silver

I am reading the Hugo finalists for Best Novel. So far it's not going so great.

The Galaxy, and the Ground Within is a novel set on the barren planet of Gora, which has a small waypost for travellers to fuel up mid-journey. Owing to a Plot Event of the satellite fleet crashing into each other, a half dozen different aliens are stranded together on the planet for a few days. This is very much supposed to be a character-driven book, not a plot-driven one.

I didn't like it very much.

( more review )

Two very different books set at rather different times!

I realized when I was reading Jhegaala that I have no idea what a jhegaala is like, and honestly...I'm still confused. All I'm clear on is the metamorphosis but um, I'm not even sure what the bodyplan is like. Some of the animals are just regular Earth animals, some are analogous, some are mythical creatures, and the jhegaala is just confusing.

Also, I've come to realize that the omnibuses really change my behaviour when it comes to reading. I get what I think of as book hangovers, so consumed with the just-read book that I don't want to start another book, even when I know I'll enjoy it. I also definitely have this inertia where I'll keep reading something even though I don't like it that much, but I'm making progress and every time I open my reading app, it's already open and it's not that bad. (This is how I read all the Michael Scott Rohan books. My opinion kept sliding but I was midway through the book and trilogy already...) I also sometimes feel like I need a certain emotional energy to get started on a new book - to get accustomed to and learn the characters and setting. But when it's an omnibus, I don't even have to open a new file. It doesn't feel like a new book, really. I feel the pressure of "just finish the book" push me over the threshold of energy required to start the new book.

Which is to say, I read Dzur and Jhegaala in two days because they were in one volume. I do like them a lot but I also think the omnibus structure is pushing me to read them faster!

( Dzur )

( Jhegaala )

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

So in the past few days I've read three Agatha Christie novels (and have downloaded from the library about...let me count...fifteen of her novels?) Oh my god I love them. I had a fairly long dry spell of reading no new books and then all of a sudden I read almost one a day.

GREAT HONKING SPOILERS UNDER CUTS.

I read Cards on the Table first.
( Cards on the Table )

Then Death on the Nile:
( Death on the Nile )

Then The Hollow:
( The Hollow )

I gotta stop because I like being surprised by mystery novels (I never do try too hard to solve them, I glance over the diagrams). So now I am putting a ban on the rest of the Christie novels sitting in my calibre library.

I ALSO just devoured Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant and that's why the Christie reviews are so short, I have to talk about these right now too.

( Both novels )
More to come about DWJ I hope.

This book was so bad. I read it all the way through because I wanted to figure out what was going on and partly because the worldbuilding premise and finally, because if a book is terrible and I'm 50% through I might as well finish it and pick it apart.

I really really wanted to like this book. Here is the back cover, but its premise can be summed up in the following words--"alternate-universe nineteenth-century Egyptian empire with spies and terrorist Otto von Bismark."

Lord Scott Oken, a prince of Albion, and Professor-Prince Mikel Mabruke live in a world where the sun never set on the Egyptian Empire. In the year 1877 of Our Lord Julius Caesar, Pharaoh Djoser-George governs a sprawling realm that spans Europe, Africa, and much of Asia. When the European terrorist Otto von Bismarck touches off an international conspiracy, Scott and Mik are charged with exposing the plot against the Empire.

Their adventure takes them from the sands of Memphis to a lush New World, home of the Incan Tawantinsuyu, a rival empire across the glittering Atlantic Ocean. Encompassing Quetzal airships, operas, blood sacrifice and high diplomacy, Ramona Wheeler's Three Princes is a richly imagined, cinematic vision of a modern Egyptian Empire.

This is such a cool premise and setting but it's botched because plotting was a mess, characterization painful and writing abysmal.

( I did not like this book )

I am so bitterly disappointed. I love speculative fiction and I love alternate history--to describe this book as up my alley cannot describe how excited I was to read this--and it was just horrible on so many fronts. It was so bad that it lowered my opinion of Tor, who published this. It wasn't entertainingly bad, it was incompetent. Complete, sheer incompetence. I expected so, so much better.

(well, I composed this entry back in October, so I might as well post it before it becomes December, good grief. November is a month that is exhaustingly busy. Hello, flist, my old friends! I've come to talk to you again.)

I've been looking at yuletide letters and it makes me laugh/cry that both letters for Shades of Grey both start with "I don't think hiatus will ever end" and that's why they're requesting fic. If I'd known Fforde was a serial WIP author, I'd have...well, I'd probably have still read the book, because concepts like colour hierarchy are catnip, but I would have known going in!

JASPER FFORDE, PLEASE.

--

In other news I read Peter Watts' Blindsight which I've had a copy of forever and had actually assumed was a self-pubbed book, which is possibly why I left it for so long (it was available free, the cover is, well) but it was really good.

It's a first encounter with aliens book, with a crew of five sent out to investigate. Narrated by Siri Keaton, who is there to record and interpret events, the crew is led by a vampire with faster-than-human reflexes and thought, and who can solve problems intuitively that humans can't. There is the Gang, a multiple personality/disassociative identity, all of whom are linguists; Isaac Szpindel, a biologist; and Amanda Bates, a military commander. All of them, including Siri, have been extensively modified. In his youth Siri had brain surgery to remove seizures, Szpindel barely has fine motor skills because he's almost more machine than human.

It was a really packed book with a lot going on, told out of sequence. There's Earth, which apparently is a post-scarcity world, and where people have chosen to be uploaded into Heaven, which appears to be a virtual reality, which says something about how far into the future it's set. Then one day "Fireflies" happens, which is like a massive meteor-shower canvassing every square inch of the earth, and Earth concludes it's some alien intelligence that has just taken a photograph of the planet. They send out Theseus, crewed by vampire Sarasti, to investigate.

( Review! Spoilers. )

I am going to cut the review short here because I'll never finish if I go on, because I could talk about the post-scarcity economy (I admit I am having so much trouble trying to imagine a post-scarcity world), the idea of Heaven (download brain into virtual world), the various professions onboard the Theseus, the Theseus controlling reveal, the vampires angle, Keaton's terrible difficulty with relating to humans, how human society has changed, the biology parts (this was the coolest part and I definitely need to read more of Watts), the game theory (that was fun to encounter! I wonder if you can apply our human-centric payoffs to model alien behaviour? IS our model with its assumptions robust enough to deal with this? Does the preceding mean I have spent too much time studying game theory?), AND MANY OTHER THINGS, but basically I recommend this book, a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. Especially if you like SF. Then again, if you like SF and you are not completely out of the loop like me you've probably a) read it or b) heard about it and decided not to. But in case you do want to, it is up for download legally on his website under a non-commercial license. In epub, pdf, HTML directly on the site. 10/10

(this review has taken FOREVER to write. I finished reading this August 27 and it's now October.)

Sire Galan has forbidden his servant and lover Firethorn to follow him to war, but she disobeys. When the army of Corymb sets sail for Incus, she is aboard a ship of the fleet, gambling on Galan's welcome.

But the gods are as apt to meddle with the schemes of a lowborn mudwoman as the best-laid plans of her betters. The searing touch of Wildfire leaves Firethorn shattered, haunted, estranged from herself, and set apat from others.

She feels cursed, but others see her as blessed. Whores come to her for healing, and soldiers search her every utterance for hidden prophecies. Is she a charlatan or a true seer? Even Firethorn cannot answer that question. And Galan is wary of what Wildfire has made of her.

Synopsis from the book jacket.

This is the sequel of Firethorn, where the protagonist Firethorn, a mudwoman who fled the Kingswood manor, follows Sire Galan as he marches to war. There the armies of King Thyrse assemble, waiting for favourable winds and omens to depart.

Now in Wildfire the armies have decamped, and Firethorn is following in their wake. At sea, the ship encounters a huge storm and Firethorn is struck by a bolt of lightning. It nearly kills her, and when she recovers somewhat she discovers she has severe aphasia and can't read. When they land, they find that the vanguard has already successfully conquered the city of Lanx. Galan takes her in, but without being able to speak coherently she's not capable of doing things she used to. Without literacy she can't read the godsigns when she throws bones to divine; with her memory and voice shattered she can't act as a healer. Powerful men like the Crux and the priests of Rift alternatively use her confused words as an oracle, or suspect she's lying and a spy.

After Firethorn gets separated from Galan - she stays behind to help her friend Mai, another sheath, in childbirth - she is captured by the enemy, King Corvus. Corvus decides to take a risky mountain pass during winter after weeks of harassment from Queenmother Caelum's troops, and nearly kills his army doing so. They pass into Lambeth and Firethorn is sold as a bondswoman, then becomes one of the unclean, and then finally a whore-celebrant.

( This review got very meandering because the book was so long and meandering itself, and does have spoilers. And some gruesome bits. )

I don't know how to recommend this book. It was very engrossing but also kind of painful to slog through (and to review, as you can see; the book was rambly and so the review is all over the place too.) I initially picked up Firethorn thinking it'd be a book on peasants in a medieval setting and I did not get that. I've been suckered into them, though, so I'll be checking once in awhile to see if there's ever any news about a third book. Wildfire is most definitely incomplete. 7/10

These books were like a rollercoaster. I started yelling near the end ("WHAT!! WHAT!!") I also read them one after another so I'm not going to even try to do a book-by-book review, just a giant one for all three books. And the review kind of exploded on me. It's really long.

SO! These books!

They're all 500-700 pages by my e-reader and oh my god, I haven't had this level of can't-put-it-down for such a long time. They were magnetic.

The first book follows Vin, a young skaa thief who is attached to a crew scaming noblemen and obligators. In Luthadel, the capital, the skaa live and work in terrible conditions, subjugated by the nobility and the Lord Ruler. Vin has survived thus far because she makes herself small and unnoticed, but also because the crew leaders have--consciously or unconsciously--picked up on her ability to make scams go better when she's around.

When she meets Kelsier, a man bent on creating a skaa rebellion, she finds out what that ability is Allomancy. She's a Mistborn, someone who can ingest different types of metal and then burn them to increase herstrength, see better, affect others' emotions, telekinetically pull and push metal, etc. Mistings--who can burn one type of metal--are fairly rare, and Mistborn, who can burn all ten, even rarer. Kelsier introduces her to his crew and starts training her both in Allomancy and to infiltrate the nobility.

Their rebellion is operated directly under the noses of the Lord Ruler, and there is the ever-present danger of his Inquisitors and the Steel Ministry. Supernaturally powerful and fast, they are the priests of the Lord Ruler and seek out and kill half-skaa Allomancers. There are the obligators, who witness every transaction of the nobility and are the bureaucracy of the Lord Ruler. And there is the power of the nobility, who "rent" the skaa for plantation work but essentially act as the owners of skaa.

( The Final Empire )

( The Well of Ascension )

( The Hero of Ages )

( The books as a whole--general impressions, thematically interesting points, etc - warning though, these books have significant twists that are discussed under the cut )

They were really good books. But I'm going to go read a nice, relaxing, fluffy novel next.

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.

I read twelve of Marie de France's lays yesterday. I read the version by Burgess and Busby (published by Penguin, 1999), who translate them into (modern ¹) English prose. If you're not familiar, they're lays attributed to a twelfth-century author, who lived in England (hence the appellation of "from France"). She is quite upfront about where she has gotten these stories; I think all of them I read had an introductory few lines saying they were Breton lays, and that they were true stories at the end.

I think they are the most courtly things I've ever read. Many of them are quite short--even translated into prose, they are are two small pages. Others are longer, but they are full of knights and ladies (generally unnamed), usually suffering one way or another because of love. The first one was about a man, who, stag-hunting one day, kills the hind and it curses him (in words) to never be cured until he is loved by someone who suffers terribly for love (and he has to suffer too.) He gets on a boat that is sitting inexplicably in his harbour, and it spirits him away to a woman whose husband, being jealous, has locked her in an island keep. They are of course discovered, but before they are separated they tie complex knots into each other--the woman has a belt tied, and the man has his shirt-tails knotted. It's very Cinderella at the end; they eventually identify each other because the knots cannot be untied by anyone else.

Then there are ones like the one where the king falls in love with his seneschal's wife, and they plot to kill the seneschal by preparing two baths, one with warm water and the other with scalding. Well, they set them out in the chamber while the seneschal went out, and of course he returned while they were in bed. The king leaps out of bed hastily to conceal his purpose and lands most in the scalding one, where he dies. (Then so does the seneschal's wife.)

Lots of love, adultery, jealousies, and surprisingly lots of happily-ever-afters. There's just a lot of variety--sometimes they persevere and have a happy ending, sometimes they die horribly/tragically, and others just...culminate in revenge attained. There was also the story of the couple who sent each other messages in a swan for twenty years (the woman was married). I am not sure but I think it was just the one swan. I had to Wikipedia this but apparently swans can and do live up to twenty! Other things which appeared: werewolf husbands, men shapeshifting into hawks, and jealousy leading to killing nightingales. OK, so I exaggerate, there's only one of each. But the werewolf one took me aback.

Something I've begun to associate with medieval writing is the bald assertion, when setting up characterization, that the protagonist of this story is a worthy, humble, generous, good, athletic and skilled. I'm not retaining the words very well, but you get the gist. I like it. It gets some description out and you are free to just drop it and follow the action and see how your idea of "good" lines up with the writer's.

My edition has a few of the original Old French (in verse) in the back. My modern French is decent enough, especially in reading, but Old French has definitely changed enough that you catch some, miss most. Sounding out helps. It was interesting though, because you can see that her lines are very short, and she speaks very directly. Reading the looooong introductions and seeing the poems for yourself are two different things. And speaking of long introductions, the introduction should be short and give as little information as is possible. If there are notes on translation and context and everything it should go in the back. I waded almost fifteen pages through an excruciatingly detailed introduction on each different lay before I gave up and just went for the actual lays.

¹ It's always interesting to read translations through epubs from Project Gutenberg--you're reading two separate layers of historical writing. The first is whenever the original was written, and the second is the undeniably early-20th-century prose.