It's been a while since I've done one of these, hasn't it? checks calendar winces Way too long.

Part of that was the grind of the Book That Wouldn't End. Not the novel I'm writing, mind you, but the book way down at the end of this list, the one that took me all of August and most of September to finish. And it was good! But very dry and dense in an academic way, and so reading it was like shoving day-old oatmeal into my brain. Healthy, for sure! But not fun.

And part of it has been simply time. I've neglected this blog, I feel, mostly because somewhere between July and now everything seemed to speed up, all at once, and I suddenly had no time for anything. It definitely contributed to the writer's block I'm just now climbing out of. And it meant certain things -- like these posts -- just got dropped.

But! I'm on the mend, mental-health-wise (I think. I hope), reading again, and writing, so it's time to pick things back up here.

As always, reviews are posted in reverse chronological order, with the most recent book I finished first.

Lovecraft Country, by Matt Ruff

Finally got around to this one. And I can easily see how it could become a TV series; not only is the book very visual and quick-moving (in terms of style), but each section forms its own little “episode” where a different character takes the spotlight and has a supernatural encounter (of various kinds). It all builds to a climax that’s so perfect — and perfectly justified — I’m looking forward to re-reading it just to see all the threads coming together again.

The Likeness, by Tana French

Jesus, this one sucked me in. The Irish lilt to the dialog, the immersive descriptions of the country house where most of the book takes place, the personal history of the characters...Can you want to live inside a murder mystery? Because damned if I didn’t want to spend more time with this one. Expertly done, from start to finish.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

Ok, this one had me with the title alone. I was worried that it couldn’t deliver on that promise, but I needn’t have been. It’s a cross of Groundhog Day and Quantum Leap, mixed with some classic Agatha Christie, topped with a powerful message about forgiveness. I don’t want to say anything more, for fear of spoiling it, but if that sounds like your bag, pick it up; you won’t be disappointed.

Luminferous, by J Dianne Dotson

The finale is here! A series literally decades in the making (the author wrote the first draft of what became the second book in her teens) finally gets the send-off it deserves. I won’t spoil anything here, just to say that this fourth book continues the trend of each one being better than the last.

If you’ve enjoyed the series so far, there’s plenty of twists and turns to keep you hooked. If you haven’t read any of them yet but enjoy old-school sci-fi (think classic Star Trek or Anne McCaffrey) you should check them out!

The Field and the Forge, by John Landers

The book that almost killed me.

It's a survey -- just a survey! -- of the kinds of physical restraints an organic economy imposes on technology, culture, and warfare. It's incredibly eye-opening, and completely ruins any sense of "realism" you might have felt lingered in shows like Game of Thrones.

Also, nothing makes me appreciate modern life more than thinking about how just to transport food (say, grain, or fruit) to a market in pre-industrial times, you were usually transporting by animal, but just to get there you had to bring food along for yourself and for the pack animal, which meant traveling more than a few hours (let alone more than a day) was simply not viable (because at some point the animal is carrying just food that's going to be consumed along the way, making the trip worthless economically).

There's some theory packed in there, which Landers is gracious enough to admit is completely bogus but serves to illuminate different aspects of these complex phenomena. The interaction between population, production efficiency, and military size is especially instructive. Ditto the possibility for certain inheritance schemes to lead to a surplus of "second sons" that have nothing and thus no stake in society, causing all kinds of trouble.

Anyway, I'm glad I read it, I might refer to it from time to time, but ye gods I will never be re-reading it.

My wife's been out of town most of this past month (helping her mother recover from cataract surgery), so I've been leaning on books (and friends!) more to keep me sane company.

As ever, I've listed the books in reverse order, with the one I read most recently listed first.

The Silk Roads, by Peter Frankopan

Not what I expected at all. I'd hoped for a thorough, wide-ranging, history of Central Asia. What I got instead was a history of Europe, told from the perspective of how events in Central and East Asia impacted Europeans.

So...not the kind of thing you can really use as research material for a novel set in the Central Asian steppes, as I'd wanted 😬

But once I got over my expectations, I settled in for what turned out to be a very enjoyable, very readable history. It's lopsided, in that he spends only about 1/3 of the book on the vast majority of human history (everything before 1800, that is), and spends a lot of time in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Even so, it's a good corrective to our usual look at the past six hundred years. Especially when it comes to the "rise" of Europe, Frankopan deftly illustrates how the real story was the theft of vast sums from the Americas and Africa to Europe, which was then funneled to Asia to obtain spices, silk, paper, etc etc. The "normal" situation for the world is for money to flow East, and the development of China and the various former Soviet Republics in Central Asia is less a revolution than a return to history's status quo.

Oh, one last thing: This book does a much better job of laying out the perfidy and fickleness of the United States in its dealings with the rest of the world than the next book in my list. Leave the history to the historians, I suppose?

American Rule, by Jared Yates Sexton

I wanted to like this one. I really did. I wholeheartedly support Sexton's goal here, which is to pierce the myths that we're frequently taught as American "history."

The trouble is -- and the reason I couldn't actually finish the book -- in order for that kind of argument to be effective, you really have to get your own history right. And Sexton, um, doesn't.

Here's a sample paragraph (from page 10):

...England's monarchy had long been held as unquestionable. This perception of the divine right of kings was forged in the centuries following the fall of Rome as civilization in Western Europe languished in apocalyptic ruin and struggled through the so-called Dark Ages. In this time, the one uniting tether of humanity was religion...

There's...so much...wrong with that paragraph.

The absolute monarchy he's talking about was something invented in the early modern period, not the Middle Ages ("Dark Ages", as any historian worth their salt will tell you, is an offensively wrong term for the period). And the doctrine of absolute monarchy had nothing to do with the fall of Rome (itself a disputed event), and everything to do with the centralizing projects European monarchs embarked on after centuries of conquest and consolidation.

Far from civilization "languishing" in Western Europe for hundreds of years, the Middle Ages saw rapid urbanization, expansion of trade, and the foundation of Europe's first universities.

And religion being the one unifier? As opposed to any, oh, government? That's...fuck, that's just laughable

These are not small mistakes. They're massive mis-representations of the period and the trends within it. And Sexton makes mistakes like this on every page (nearly every paragraph)!

I couldn't take it. So I noped out.

The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King

My second of two (see below) King books this month that don't read like King books. This is told like a fairy tale, with the same sort of remove and third-person omniscience you'd have in a fairy tale. It's the same voice King sometimes used in the latter part of the Dark Tower series.

And as far as I know, this is King's one and only full-blown medieval fantasy book: kings and wizards, magic and dragons. I picked it up because of the connections to his other books -- the king's name is Roland, you see, and the (evil) wizard's name is Flagg -- not expecting too much.

I should have known better. Even in this mode, King is a master storyteller, weaving a tale of family and betrayal and escape that captivated me all the way to the end.

The Running Man, by Stephen King

Ok, technically this is a Richard Bachman book, since that's the name King released it under originally. But they made a friggin' Swarzenegger movie out of it, so I've got to include it in my reading list, right?

Interestingly enough, I can see why King published this one under a pen name. Because it doesn't read like a King book at all. There's no slow build up of tension, no deep dive into the lives of multiple characters before everything goes to hell. It just dives right into the plot, explaining just the bare minimum about the world needed to keep up with what's going on.

And this thing moves. Each chapter is incredibly short, maybe 3 pages maximum. It's the "potato chip" technique (keep chapters so small that folks think "I can do one more"), and it works here; I read the entire thing in a single day.

On the downside, it's incredibly violent, and racist, and sexist, all at once. Granted, the world he's portraying is very much that, all the way through, but it's bigoted in a very...old-fashioned way, from the slurs they use, especially. Like 1960s racism ramped up to 11 and then set in the future.

Here's the kicker, though: King absolutely nailed how misinformation, spread through the media, can keep the people at the bottom of the economy apart, keep them hating each other, when they should be attacking the wealthy. And he portrays our current "meritocratic" caste system perfectly, illustrating how inequality can get so locked in that the only way out for some people is to offer to die on national television. That's the horrific part of the book, for me, the part the lingered after closing the book.

The White Album, Joan Didion

Didion's essays covering the Seventies (and part of the later Sixties). I could definitely feel a cynicism creeping in, something present in the first book of hers i read and becoming stronger with each essay here.

But she continues to draw moments in time in vivid colors, and is brutally frank about her experiences with mental health issues during this period. Just...compellingly readable, all the way through.

I'd like to say I wish I could write like her, but then I'm not sure how I would even begin to learn or adopt her techniques. Intimidatingly good.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion

Wasn't sure what to expect with this one. The title is...a bit pretentious, at least to my ears.

But the essays are as unpretentious as they come. Didion, for the most part, refuses to generalize or judge, choosing instead to capture the moment, or series of moments, that she experienced with and around certain people, at certain times.

The result is a bit like a time capsule of the Sixties, or at least, the parts of the Sixties that she experienced in California.

Her writing is a bit hypnotic, in that way. In how she brings you into a moment, even if that moment itself is a composite of other moments, showing you what it felt like, if not what actually occurred. Makes her essays a bit addictive, tbh, each one a hit of experience from another place and time.

The one downside? Because she's writing so close to her own experience, her version of the Sixties is very...white. And middle class. To the point where, when she talks about the farming communities she grew up in, she doesn't talk about the actual workers on those farms, who were organizing throughout the Sixties to advocate for better working conditions for the majority-immigrant workforce. Nor does she mention the Civil Rights movements, or the Black Panthers, or...I could go on and on. Suffice to say that her viewpoint is very well detailed, but is very much myopic.

The year is already half over? And California's re-opening while vaccination rates are slowing and the Delta variant is spreading and...

breathes

...and I've been fully vaccinated for two months now, but I'm still keeping a low profile, wearing a mask in public, and avoiding crowds as much as possible.

Oh, and reading! Mix of essays and horror and, well, horror hesitates tools? Is that a thing? Because I read one.

As always, the books are in reverse reading order, with the most recent one I plowed through first.

Christine, by Stephen King

Definitely the worst of the King re-reads so far (and also the first one to not be set in Maine, make of that what you will).

I almost put this one down, after the rough opening and dialog that seemed broadcast from a 1940s B-movie. I'm glad I kept going, because the story eventually kicks into King-Dread-Gear and becomes compelling. The dialog never really gets better, and the car scare is just plain weird, but the possession bit was goose-bumps-down-my-neck spooky.

Hood Feminism, by Mikki Kendall

A series of excellently-written, pointed essays that I quickly realized were not aimed at me. Not that everything needs to be, of course!

Still illuminating. Kendall has no trouble stabbing through all the BS we tell ourselves about these issues and calling them out for what they are. Points to a type of feminism concerned less with Leaning In and more with putting food on the table. A critical work on fundamental problems with the way American does and doesn't work for its people.

Body Trauma, by David W Page

This one was slow going for me. I get squeamish around needles, to the point where I get lightheaded whenever I have blood drawn (I've only passed out once, so there). But it was recommended by Tim Waggoner's Writing in the Dark, and in the book I'm writing (and in short stories I'm working on), I need to be able to portray injuries and recovery accurately. So I pushed through.

And I'm glad I did! I'm sure I'll need a few re-reads for everything to sink in, but I've got a much better sense of how serious certain wounds would be, and how they can be used to raise or lower tension in a story.

wow, no thank you, by Samantha Irby

Went into this one with no idea of what I was getting into, other than the essays were supposed to be funny. And they were, in parts -- literally laugh out loud funny, in fact -- but above all they're a master class in writing a revealing, engaging, personal essay. What other writer do you know can make you reflect on your own poverty-filled past while relaying a (funny) story about how they thought their cheap-and-shitty apartment was haunted? Or make you admire them while they constantly put themselves down and refer to themselves as a "trash person"? That's a magic trick played with words, and Irby pulls it off again and again and again.

Took a break from my Stephen King read-a-thon to dive into some non-fiction this month.

As always, these are listed in reverse chronological order. So, the book I just finished is listed first, followed by the one I read before that, and so on.

Let's dig in!

Creative Selection, by Ken Kocienda

Polished, refined prose. Kocienda pulls just shy of a dozen stories from his time at Apple in the early 2000s to illustrate what he sees as the principles behind their back-to-back successes in that period, from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad.

Each chapter begins with the story, and then ends with him picking it apart, revealing the particular aspect of the Apple process (really, more like goals or guidelines) that he wants to focus on.

It's all well-told, and they're entertaining stories, but I can't escape the feeling that it could all have been summarized in one word: Demos.

The Nordic Theory of Everything, by Ana Partanen

Absolutely fascinating. Partanen is a journalist and a naturalized American citizen, originally from Finland, and she wrote this book in 2015-2016 after living here for several years.

Her goal is definitely not to knock the United States -- she bends over backwards, in fact, to insist over and over again how much she loves Americans and was excited to live here -- but to point out the widening gap between what we say we value -- families, children, individual choice -- and what our policies actually value. She uses a "Nordic Theory of Love" as a through-line, connecting how Nordic policies on healthcare, vacation, school, parental leave, etc all enable a greater freedom of choice for the people that live there.

Full confession: My wife and I have been contemplating a move to Northern Europe, and I picked this up as part of some research into what it might be like to live there. While I think many of the policy changes Partanen outlines would be wonderful if adopted in the United States, given our current political climate, I don't think they'll be adopted any time soon.

Partanen, apparently, agrees with me; she returned to Finland after getting pregnant with her first child (shortly after this book was published, in fact), and she hasn't returned.

Needful Things, by Stephen King

More King! A later novel, this one's a bit of door-stopper. But it's still King at the top of his game: small-town Maine rendered in exquisite detail, slow-building tension that explodes in gory violence, and a victory so Pyrrhic as to be more like a truce.

I thought I knew the plot of this one, going in, based on parodies and knock-offs. But the real thing is much, much better, both more unsettling and harder to predict. The villain's motivation was a bit of a letdown, to be honest, but his methods were chef's kiss perfect.

I also felt a bit of shear between the setting as written and the setting as placed in time. Having read King's novels from the 70s and 80s, this felt more like that time period than anything else, let alone the early 90s, when the story is supposed to take place. There were some markers laid down -- I think one kid's t-shirt has a 90s band on it -- but they felt more like window-dressing. As if King had such deep knowledge of the Maine of 1960-1980 that he had trouble writing about the present. Which is perhaps why he's returned so often in later books to writing about that exact period?

Fewer books read this month. Between turning 42 and getting both doses of the vaccine, I've been reading less (but writing more?). I'd hoped to have a fourth book done before the end of the month, but that's going to have to wait :(

Anyway, here are brief, non-spoilers reviews of the three books I did get through, again in reverse chronological order (so the most recently read book is first).

Carrie, by Stephen King

At this point I should just confess that I've decided to read all of the classic King books. Everything I missed growing up (parents!): Carrie, Cujo, Christine, Needful Things, etc.

This was King's first book, and it's amazing how much his writing improved between it and his second (Salem's Lot). Carrie is a lot faster paced than the other book, but as a result I didn't feel like I really got to know (or care about) a lot of the characters.

Even so, it's a gut-punch of a book. Would recommend.

Trade in Classical Antiquity, by Neville Morley

A non-fiction palate-cleanser between horror novels. Recommended by the author of acoup.blog, whose insightful and detailed critiques of the "medieval" world represented in the Games of Thrones TV series drew me in.

It's a short book, more of an extended scholarly essay than anything else. Morley's goal here seems to be to poke holes in two of the leading schools of thought about trade in the classical Mediterranean: one that holds trade couldn't possibly have been worth noting because of subsistence farming, and another that basically says globalization arrived thousands of years earlier than we thought.

I'm not familiar enough with those other schools to tell if that's a straw-person argument or not. But Morley lays out his own case well, arguing for a sort of middle approach, relying on archeological evidence that shows trade in certain goods was in fact massive, while admitting the large gaps in our understanding of the period. Certainly food for thought when designing a classical-like society, or writing a story set in the classical period.

The Dead Zone, by Stephen King

Published the year I was born! King's fifth book published under his own name.

Again I could see both the commonalities in the way he tells stories (newspaper clippings and interviews sprinkled throughout, a sharp focus on the minutiae of small-town life) and the leveling-up of his skills in the use of those techniques (and exploration of those themes).

Very much a horror-as-dread book, rather than blood-and-guts. Reminded me of his later book 11/22/63, not in the time travel aspect, but in the dilemma the protagonist faces towards the end (no spoilers, it's worth the read). King's rendition of the political mood of 1976 jibes with everything I've read about that election by recent historians, and his construction of a populist politician with evil in his heart and elections to win felt...let's say a little prescient, after 2016?

A Note on the Casual Racism in King's Earlier Books

While I'm reading through King's oeuvre, and enjoying it, for the most part, there's a few...problematic things that pop up again and again, like sour notes among an otherwise well-written symphony. And I feel the need to call them out, rather than skip over them.

Most striking, for me, in reading these now, is the way King drops at least one racist bit of imagery in each of the books I've read up to this point. Adjectives like "n*ardly", or describing a character's grossly misshapen and swollen lips as "African".

It jerks me out of the book each time, and makes me wonder why he (or the publisher) doesn't go back and remove it. This isn't in character dialog, it's narrative description, and it would be easy -- very easy -- to remove the short phrase that contains it without really altering the book at all. Why not change it?

More insidious is the way these books have basically no black people. In Needful Things, which I'm reading now, there's one (one!) black character, and he's only allowed to be a janitor, and his dialog is written...well, let's just say King tries to render what he feels is a Black manner of speech, and it comes across as a caricature. I know some of these books were written before I was born, but I swear there were Black people in America back then, even in Maine. Leaving them out altogether feels...strange. Less like oversight, and more like an authorial blindspot.

These elements might change in his later works (and I hope they do!). And I'm certainly not trying to say anything about King the person, especially given how much time has elapsed between when he wrote these books and today. I must hope that whoever he is now, it's a better version of himself than when he wrote these.

But these racist elements are in the books, and I feel must be called out as such.

Ok, I didn't get this posted in time for the end of March, but better late then never, eh?

Continuing the theme of posting short reviews of the things I read each month, here's what I've consumed since last time, again in reverse order (so, the most recent book first):

Seven-Gun Snow White, by Catherynne M Valente

The first book is also one I couldn't finish. I love the premise of this book: a Western retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. And Valente is one of my favorite authors! Should have been right up my alley.

But the whole thing is written in dialect, which is annoying for me at the best of times. And when it's an author from the Northeast trying (emphasis on the trying) to write an entire novella in a Southwestern accent, this Texan just can't take it.

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

This one I enjoyed! Very well-crafted fantasy. Hard to say anything without spoiling the plot, but basically it weaves in themes from Frankenstein, the Wizard of Oz, multiverses, and time travel (of a sort...you'll see) to construct something wholly original. I'll be studying this one for pointers on style and craft.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

I didn't think it was possible to make a compelling single-monster horror. But Jones has done it, and done it with characters and traditions (Blackfeet and Crow) you don't normally find in American literature. This one was so good I read it all in one gulp, in a single day.

Four Lost Cities, by Annalee Newitz

Another one I wanted to like, but couldn't get through. It's supposed to be a survey of four historical cities that, for various reasons, were abandoned, even after long periods of growth and popularity. It promised some insights into the debates we're starting to have about the sustainability of modern cities, and whether climate change will mean their inevitable decline.

Instead, I kept running into mischaracterizations and outright mistakes. One glaring error is in the location of Pompeii, which the author has right in the text but wrong on the maps. One mischaracterization is the author projecting the myth of the noble savage onto the population of an ancient city, even after they relay an exchange with an expert that lays bare the flaws of their assumption!

I can't read nonfiction that I can't trust, so I put this one down.

Writing in the Dark by Tim Waggoner

Wrote about this one last week. Recommended for anyone that's even thinking of writing horror.

Salem's Lot by Stephen King

King mentions in the intro to this one that he wrote this book partially because he wanted to see if it was possible to wed a literary story about a small Maine town with a Dracula-inspired vampire tale. That duality runs throughout the book, with passages that wouldn't be out of place in the New Yorker followed by harrowing chapters filled with dread. So in reading it, I felt like I was watching the evolution of King the writer in real time, with his literary aspirations slowly giving way to his mastery of horror techniques.

Oh, and the story absolutely still works, even after all this time!

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

Holy shit, this one. Another book that hooked me from the first page, and held me until I'd swallowed it all in a single day. An absolutely brilliant -- and ambiguous -- take on Lovecraftian horror. I immediately went and ordered more LaValle after finishing it.

Genghis Kahn by Paul Ratchnevsky

Another book I picked up after it was referenced on acoup.blog. Not as readable as The Mongol Art of War, but covers similar ground. Interesting for insights into how Genghis built up his empire, via political manuevering as shrewd policy as much as through battle.

With the new year, Biden settling into the White House, and the vaccines rolling out, my reading pace has picked up from its previous pandemic low.

So rather than work up longer individual reviews of the books I've gone through, I thought I'd do a quick breakdown of them, all at once, in reverse order (so, the most recent book I finished this month is listed first).

Here we go!

Not All Dead White Men, by Donna Zuckerberg

A frustrating read. Zuckerberg (yes, the Facebook founder is her brother) provides a detailed, anthropological study of how the denizens of the manosphere wield Classical authors to promote their racist, misogynist views. What she doesn't cover is any way to counter these arguments. If anything, she comes down on their side, agreeing that yes, the Classical tradition contains lots of misogyny (Though no racism, since race as a concept wasn't invented till the modern period. Which makes it weird that she would fall into the right-wing trap of assigning Whiteness to the Mediterranean authors of the Classical tradition? But I digress).

The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, by Michael Lewis

A set of separately-published essays stitched together in book form. It works, because each essays illuminates a different side of the central question: What happened when an administration scornful of expertise took control of the nation's experts?

This was published in 2018, and already Lewis could see -- via his interviews and investigation -- that disaster was coming. We've got a lot to rebuild.

The Mongol Art of War, by Timothy May

Discovered this via military historian Bret Devereux's excellent series of blog posts about the historical accuracy of the Dothraki in A Song of Ice and Fire (narrator: there is none).

It's a fairly quick read, giving a detailed look -- well, as detailed as we can get, given the reliability of our historical sources -- at how the Mongol army was able to conquer so much of Asia and Europe in such a short period of time. Goes through command structure, tactics, even some detailed logistics. For example, did you know Mongols preferred riding mares on campaign, because they could drink the milk provided (and thus not need to bring as much food along)? Or that the Mongols built a navy from scratch (with Korean assistance) just so they could conquer southern China? Fascinating stuff.

Lost Art of Finding Our Way, by John Edward Huth

This is one I'm going to be reading and re-reading. It's basically a manual of all the different navigation techniques used by humans before the invention of GPS. How did the Pacific Islanders sail thousands of miles across open ocean to settle so many islands? Why did the Atlantic triangle trade develop the way it did (hint: it was the prevailing winds)? What sequence of clouds denotes an oncoming storm?

Simply wondrous. Made me look at the world around me in an entirely new way.

Reaganland, by Rick Perlstein

The final volume in Perlstein's excellent series on the rise of the Right in the United States. This one covers 1976-1980, and it's absolutely riveting. All of the techniques we've seen from the GOP under Trump -- misinformation, distortion, and deliberate hyperbole -- got their start in this time period, and coalesced around Reagan as their standard-bearer. His election cemented the shift to the Right that we've been suffering from for the last forty years.

I consider this book essential reading, if you want to understand how we got to this point in American politics.

Apex Magazine is back!

Apex went on what looked like permanent hiatus while editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore dealt with multiple surgeries for serious health issues (see his editorial in this month's magazine). But he's thankfully recovered, and after a successful Kickstarter, he's re-assembled the Apex editing team, and resurrected the magazine!

Issue 121, then, is their first new issue in almost two years. It's a double issue, as all of them will be from now on, released every two months. You can grab your own copy here

So let's dive in! (no spoilers, I promise).

Root Rot, by Fargo Tbakh

Jesus, this story.

Reading it is disorienting at first. There's a good reason for that, for why the narrator's voice seems jumbled and confused. But as I read, more and more pieces fell into place, until the very last scene broke my heart.

I wish I could write something this powerful. This moving. An inspiration, and a bar to shoot for.

Your Own Undoing, by P H Lee

Second person, represent!

I usually hate stories told in the second person. All those "You"s feel like commands, and I instinctually kick back against those, and out of the story.

Not so in this case. Lee's story wove a meta fairy tale around me, a story that was itself an illustration of the conflict at its heart.

If it sounds too clever for its own good, don't be put off. It's not. It's a fantastic story, first and foremost. It's only afterward, when thinking about it, that its clever structure reveals its shape. Just amazing.

Love, That Hungry Thing, by Cassandra Khaw

This one....this one did feel too clever for its own good, for me.

Not in structure, but in the way it leans so far into the modern (well, post-2004) tendency to leave readers out on a limb. Being confused can work -- see the first story, above -- for a while, but I (being very careful here, as I know not everyone shares my tastes) tend to get very frustrated if there's no payoff at the end.

And there's no payoff in this story, for me. In fact, there's very little action at all, or even dialog.

A lot of beautiful description, though. Evocative words and phrases that promise glittering insight into this future, but then never cohere into a stable image. Nothing falls into place. It's an exquisitely described place, though.

Mr Death, by Alix E Harrow

My favorite of the bunch.

I don't want to say too much, lest I give anything away. Let me just say that this is what I wish the movie Soul had been. Read it. You won't regret it.

The Niddah, by Elana Gomel

A short story about a global pandemic. Yes, really.

Grey Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts, by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Had an allergic reaction to this one. Something about another story that drops the reader into a confused space, with no explanation, and calls its main environment "The City."

All I Want for Christmas, by Charles Payseur

Short, powerful flash piece. Made me shudder.

I turned the corner, and my soul left my body.

My wife says I walked around slack-jawed, not speaking, not noticing anyone or anything else.

It was our first trip to Galaxy's Edge, at Disneyland.

We'd been walking around the other areas of the park all day, in the lingering heat of early October, 2019. I'd wanted to go to Galaxy's Edge straight away, but our friend had insisted we wait till the sun went down. When the crowds would thin, and the lights and special effects on the buildings would come out.

She was right.

Because when we finally made it there, the park was perfect. Not empty, but not crowded. Cool enough to walk around, but not yet cold.

And everything was lit up.

I've been ambiguous about a lot of things Disney has done with the Star Wars franchise. But that day, in that park, I forgave them everything.

Because they nailed it.

The streets, the buildings, the design of the doors, the mother-fucking Milennium Falcon sitting right there, looking every inch a hunk of junk that's ready to race around the galaxy. They even got the sound of the floors in the Falcon right, our shoes click-clacking on the floor panels exactly as if we were being followed around by a foley artist from Lucasfilm.

It was...uncanny.

And I wanted to go back the very next day.

As you can imagine, though, we haven't been. We told ourselves we could return in the spring of 2020, just in time for my birthday.

What naïve summer children we were.

Thanks to the pandemic, there's no return trip in my near future. No immersion in the world of Black Spire Outpost.

Except through fiction.

So I picked up Dawson's book set on the world the park is meant to represent. I wanted to go back there, even for a moment, to let her words guide my imagination in invoking the spirit of the place.

Too much to ask, perhaps. But I had high hopes after reading Dawson's Phasma, where she introduced two new characters -- Vi Moradi and Cardinal -- while building out Phasma's backstory. That turned out to be a Mad-Max-via Star Wars tale wrapped inside a spy story; an incredible balancing act.

And once again, Dawson pulls it off, weaving a high-stakes story with a small-scale focus. She brings back both Vi and Cardinal, filling out more of their arcs and letting both of them shine.

But.

Something bothered me all throughout the book. I didn't know what it was at first, just a vague unease in my mind as I read along.

It wasn't until halfway through the novel that I realized what it was: the colonial attitude of Vi and the Resistance towards Batuu (the planet on which Black Spire Outpost is located).

Let me explain. No spoilers, I promise.

When the story begins, Batuu is not involved in the conflict between the Resistance the First Order. It's too small, too unimportant. The war has passed it by.

Which is one reason Vi is selected to go there, as some place the First Order won't be paying attention to.

Logical on the face of it. But it's the start of my problems with the story.

Because no one on Batuu invites the Resistance there. No one on Batuu wants to be involved in the conflict, at all.

The Resistance just assumes they have the right to build an outpost there, regardless of what the local population wants.

Which means they assume they have the right to bring the war there. To bring violence and death with them. Because they know the First Order is going to eventually discover said base, and when they do, they will respond with oppressive force.

And throughout her stay there, Vi repeatedly acts like a colonial officer sent to a "backwards" place:

• She quickly makes a deal to steal an ancient artifact and use it to bargain for supplies (instead of leaving it alone, as she has no rights to it)
• She assumes the right to squat in ancestral ruins that the people on Batuu consider sacred
• She receives medical care from a local elderly woman, which saves her life, and her thanks is to rip the woman's only help -- her grandson -- away from her. She thinks she's right to do so, as it's "for the greater good"
• She's constantly saying things like "Don't they realize I'm doing this for their own good?" every time she can't bend someone to her will
• When she finds herself using local expressions and greetings, she doesn't think of it as being respectful, but as "going native"

I could go on.

It's a frustrating flaw in an otherwise fantastic book. I like Vi, I like the other characters, I like the story, I even like the ending.

But the constant attitude of Vi and the Resistance that "we know better than you, so we're going to make these choices for you" is so...belittling, so arrogant. It feels out of character for a movement that says it's all about free will. And yet totally in line with the way we Westerners usually interact with other countries.

I still recommend the book. It's the next best thing to being there, in the park. Which is an incredible achievement, despite the problematic nature of some of its plot points.

A frustrating book. One minute, it'll be knee-deep in the blinders and false-assumptions of economics, the next it'll flip and call out economists for being too focused on GDP and not enough on human dignity.

That kind of whiplash makes me not trust anything the authors say. They're too inconsistent for me to be able to piece together a coherent approach or worldview for them.

Or argue with their takes. I mean, how do you approach someone who believes the B.S. that Silicon Valley has been spouting for decades about being "disruptive" (instead of the truth: they're VC funds chasing the bubble-high returns of monopoly) but also admits that increasing automation can displace people who should be helped?

Or a team that argues that GDP should not be used to measure growth anymore -- and even that growth is not that important -- but also uses GDP growth in their arguments for other policies (for example, that immigration does not hurt the societies that accept immigrants)?

It's all over the place.

If anything, this book further convinces me of the limits of current economic thinking. So many times, the authors posit a problem ("why don't people move around more?") that has obvious answers as soon as your take your head out of the economic sand.

I mean, so many of the things that make it hard for them to "explain" why humans act the way they do are fundamental ideas in economics that have been debunked.

Amazon isn't profitable because of its size. Amazon was a business failure for decades, that Bezos kept afloat through his access to capital. Only in the last few years, when it's become an illegal monopoly and so can flood the moat around its market, has Amazon turned a profit.

The authors swallow the Amazon line because they're still beholden to the economic idea that bigger means more efficient. But anyone that's ever worked in a large org knows that bigger organizations are less efficient than smaller ones. They just wield more economic power, and so can remain large.

And they find it hard to explain why people don't move around more (from poorer places to wealthier ones) only because they rely on the economic model of human behavior, which posits that people always act to increase their wealth, and do so efficiently.

Which is obvious bunk to anyone who has, you know, spent time around actual people.

The authors whiff on basically every issue they address. They find it hard to calculate the costs or benefits of social media, when Facebook's balance sheet is publicly available (proving social media is big business). They advocate for helping immigrants find their way in a new society, without pointing out that the policies they recommend -- job matching, housing, child care -- would benefit everyone if implemented universally, not just the displaced (and so be more politically viable).

In the end, I think they themselves sum up the book's "insights" best:

Economics is too important to be left to economists.

Well said.

I'm ashamed to say I'm not sure I knew Dinah's name, before reading this.

I knew parts of her story, from my youth, when I heard the Bible tale. How the sons of Jacob tricked every adult male in a town to become circumcised, just so their king's son could be granted the privilege of marrying Jacob's daughter.

How they then slaughtered the town while the men were laid up healing.

In church, the story's presented as a righteous thing, a sign of their cleverness. How they could outsmart their enemies.

No one said anything about Dinah. How she might have felt about things. Or about the wives and daughters of the murdered men. They were background characters, unimportant to the morality of the tale.

So how amazing, then, that Diamant has put Dinah front and center. Breathed life into her, filling in her story and giving us a complete account of her journey. Of her mistakes and triumphs. Of her hopes and fears.

It's an incredible feat to pull off. And Diamant covers not just Dinah's life, but her mothers' lives, too, starting from the moment they met Jacob, so we get the fullest picture possible of Dinah's situation, of her time and place.

She gives us a sense of the rhythms of their existence, both day-to-day and year to year, without ever getting bogged down in too many details (or leaving things so vague as to be unhelpful).

And what rhythms! Diamant invokes the feel of the ancient world, the sounds and the smells, the hassles and the joys. And it's a woman's world that she brings to life, the rituals of childbirth and the red tent, the offerings to multiple gods, the hard work of cooking and farming and making, well, everything. T

he men are present, but it's not their story. It's not their world.

Diamant's succeeded so well in showing us this world, in fact, that it's her story, Dinah's story, that I remember more vividly now, not the ones about her brothers. Which feels...proper. The way it should be.

Better to remember the healer and midwife, perhaps, than the tricksters and killers.

I've got subscriptions to half a dozen different magazines, most of whom I don't get through.

So I'm trying something new this month: reviews of different magazines, which highlight stories or articles that stuck with me. I'll also be honest about any sections that I skipped out on, and why.

My hope is that it'll incentivize me to read them through, and hopefully point you, dear reader, to articles and magazines that you might otherwise miss?

So here we go:

Overview

The theme of the issue is "The World That Trump Made," but its contents don't bear that out.

If anything, the articles drive home the fact that Trump has been mostly ineffective or inactive in global affairs. As a result, the world is one that others have made: Japan, China, Russia, Iran, Israel, etc.

And they will continue to do so, as long as the United States abrogates the leadership role it's played -- for good and for ill -- over the last eighty years.

Highlights

"A Grand Strategy of Resilience" is a fantastic pulling together of multiple threads, linking social justice movements to the ability of the US to project power abroad. The author rightly points out that an unjust and unequal society is a fragile one, and that great powers cannot weather the storms of global politics if they are not resilient.

I love the concept of resilience, and favor using it as a lens through which to judge policy. It's the kind of concept that should appeal to both conservatives and liberals: Because who wouldn't prefer to live in a more flexible, bounce-back kind of country?

"The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism" raises a problem I hadn't even considered: As different countries race to produce a vaccine for Covid-19, what will we do when/if one is found? Once made, how will presumably limited supplies be allocated? And given how global supply chains have gotten, what will we do if one country refuses to manufacture (or drives up prices on) the parts of the vaccine that its companies make?

The author argues that we should be laying the groundwork now for cooperation in sharing and manufacturing any vaccines, so agreements will already be in place by the time one is found. But like so much else, I fear the major powers have no interest in cooperating, and no leaders capable of admitting they might need other countries.

Disappointments

Went into "The Fragile Republic" expecting a good summary of threats both foreign and domestic. Got thrown out of the article just three paragraphs in, though, when the authors reach back to 1798 as their framing device, but name the opposition party as the "Republicans," instead of the correct "Democratic-Republicans."

It seems like a small thing, but it incorrectly projects the existence of the Republican Party back an additional sixty years (!). And if they can't be bothered to get that one detail right (that even this non-specialist knows), how can I trust anything else they say?

"To Protect And Serve" sounds like it's going to be a wealth of information about police practice in other countries that we can draw from. But the other than "more training," the one reform the author advocates is a federal takeover of police departments across the US, which would be politically a non-starter and doesn't help those of us advocating reform of our local police departments.

Skipped Articles

I skipped out on "The End of American Illusion," an article written by someone who worked in the Trump regime and thinks only he sees the world clearly. I don't read paeans to strongmen.

Also skipped "Giving Up on God," because I'm an atheist and the decline of religion worldwide is both not surprising (because it's been documented since the 1980s) and not worrying (ditto).

Hope. It's a hard thing to come by, for me, when it comes to the federal government.

The election of 2016 was traumatic. My wife and I watched, horrified, as the candidate we thought not even Republicans were crazy enough to pick won first the primary, and then the general election.

Well, "won." He lost the popular vote by 3 million, and still walked away with the keys to the White House, because of our country's old, undemocratic way of electing Presidents.

It was so unnerving, when it happened, that we decided not to go home.

We were living in Arkansas at the time, having moved to nurse my wife's mother back to health after she suffered a cardiovascular incident. It was our first time living in my wife's home state in seven years, and in that time, the state we remembered as slightly behind the times but neighborly had curdled into a paranoid, xenophobic place.

Bad enough having to live there at all. Living there while their white nationalist leader commanded the federal government? While they crowed about his "achievements" dismantling the legacy of eight years of Obama's government? While they felt entitled to air out their racism and sexism with impunity, with pride, even, because their man was in the White House?

We couldn't do it.

So we lived on the East Coast that winter, crashing with friends -- amazing friends, to put up with us for so long -- and moved back to California, renting an apartment sight unseen. We drove cross-country, stopped in Arkansas just long enough to pack, and then moved on.

Now, after four years of Trump's chaos, his rage and his incompetence, we've another election looming. And that same fear is back, that he'll win again, and our country, which has never been innocent, but has at times fought against its darker impulses, will instead succumb to them.

So Lichtman's theory of presidential elections -- that the campaign doesn't matter, that the candidates themselves almost don't matter, only the past four years of governing do -- gives me hope. Because after four years in power, the GOP has lost seven (!) of his thirteen "keys" to the White House, and you only need to lose six to lose the election.

Which means I can ignore the polls. I can tune out -- to some extent -- the campaign itself. I can focus on voting, on helping others to vote, and preventing election fraud.

And I can hope.

I've mentioned before that I've always been afraid of the police.

Not that I have any negative experience to make me afraid. No, I grew up White and privileged, shielded from the things they did to others.

Yet I was afraid. And I was right to be.

Because if the police can pull you over for a broken taillight, insist on a search of your car, and choke you to death when you resist said illegal search, you never want to be pulled over.

If the police can raid your house on an anonymous tip and kill your dog when it tries to protect you from the armed intruders violating your home, then leave without even an apology when they learn it's the wrong home, you never want to have them pay you a visit.

And if they have the power to insist that the only way you're going to get help with your heroin addiction is to plead guilty to a crime that hurt no one but yourself, you never want to ask them for help.

But that's where we are, in the United States. We've expanded the role and powers of police so much, that the often the only hand being held out for those who are homeless, or addicts, or mentally disturbed, is the one holding a gun.

As we re-examine the place of police in our society, Vitale's book is essential reading. It's not a screed, and not wishful thinking about how everything would be peaceful if the police went away.

Instead, it takes a hard look at what the police are for, and then dares to ask the question: Are they successful at it?

As it turns out, they're not. They're not any good at solving homelessness, or making sex work safe, or getting addicts into recovery, or reducing gang violence, or helping the mentally ill get treatment, or disciplining school children, or even something as mundane as actually preventing crime.

Police, in a word, are a failure. They're an experiment that we need to end.

Because the problems we've asked them to address can be, just by different means.

We can get the homeless into homes, and use that as a foundation to get them standing on their own again.

We can invest in businesses in and around gang-troubled neighborhoods, to give the people who might join those gangs the opportunity to do something better.

We can find other ways to discipline children than having them handcuffed and marched out of school.

The End of Police is both a passionate plea for us to find a better way, and a dispassionate look at how badly our approaches to these problems have gone wrong.

It's not too late to try something else. We just need to make the choice.

Today, the US healthcare system occupies a place very like US beer did in the 1990s.

See back then, US beer was a joke to liberals, or anyone that took beer seriously, and a point of patriotic pride to conservatives.

These days, after decades of shifting regulations that allowed the market for craft beer to first find a foothold, then blossom, US craft beer is world-renowned. Numerous pubs in other countries proclaim they serve "American-style craft beer." People across the political spectrum can take pride in their local brewers, no snobbery or jingoism required.

Our healthcare system has not experienced anything close to that kind of renaissance. Conservatives refuse to countenance any critique of the system, while liberals use it as a tired punching bag. We're warned of the dangers of "socialist medicine," all the while my mother-in-law is constantly harassed about a $4,000 bill she doesn't owe (the hospital filed it wrong with her insurance), doctors and nurses are overworked, and millions go without any sort of insurance.

And, frankly, Medicare for All sounds great, but it scares the bejeezus out of anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders. Not to mention it's sort of vague on details, and seems to require a rather large leap to get from here to there.

So I was primed for a retread of the old arguments in Which Country Has the World's Best Healthcare?. US healthcare is terrible, Canada's is great, etc etc.

Thankfully, that's not what I got at all. Instead, I found the missing manual, a way to evaluate different healthcare systems around the globe. Along with a proper sense of the history and workings of eleven of them.

Emanuel describes a set of axes along which to measure a healthcare system. Things like patient wait times, or costs at the point of service, or choice of doctors. Then he proceeds to examine each country's system in turn, looking at the things it does well, the challenges it faces, and -- most importantly -- how and why it does those things well or badly.

True, the US performs terribly on basically every axis. That's not news. What is news is that multiple countries manage to provide better coverage, better care, and cheaper care, without giving up private practices, or even -- in some cases -- letting go of private insurance!

Reading this, I felt both relieved and angry.

Relieved, because with so many different systems out there, no one's got a monopoly on the "right" way to do things.

Angry, because for so long the debate in the US has been framed as single payer or status quo. When the truth is that we can do a lot to improve our system without letting go of the basic free market nature of it.

How much further would we liberals have gotten, if we'd argued for a regulation of drug prices, instead of single-payer? Or insisted that insurance coverage for children be provided for free, as part of any policy, like it is in other countries with well-regulated markets?

We don't have to have the government take over as the single payer for everyone. We don't need to radically overhaul the system. We need to properly regulate it, to get the outcomes we want: patients being able to choose their doctor, use their insurance to help pay for their care, and not go broke obtaining the prescriptions they need.

Framed as the proper regulation of a free market, what could the conservative response have been? I suppose they could argue that Greed is Good, and everyone that has to choose between paying the rent and buying their blood pressure meds deserves it, so the CEO of some corp can enjoy a multi-million dollar bonus.

But that doesn't have quite the same ring as "death panels," does it?

So ultimately, I'm grateful that Emanuel and his team chose to write this book, and publish it now. It's high time we brought a more nuanced, useful debate, to the argument over healthcare.

Powerfully written.

Kendi lays out a set of definitions for racism, racist, and antiracist, then shows how those rules apply across different areas: culture, sexuality, gender, class, etc.

Along the way, he tells stories from his own life, using his personal growth to illustrate how following the principles of antiracism leads to also being a feminist, an ally of the LGBTQIA+ community, and an anticapitalist.

Because Kendi is so willing to be vulnerable here, to admit to his previous homophobia, his sexism, his snobbery towards other Black people, his hatred of White people, he takes us along the journey with him. And he makes it okay if you're still only part way along the journey, because he gives you a path forward.

What could easily have been a sermon, then, becomes a conversation. A directed conversation, to be sure, one with a purpose, but one where both parties admit they've made and will make mistakes. It made me want to be better, to think more clearly, than simply laying out his current perspective would.

And his anchoring of racism vs antiracism in power, and the way power is distributed among (invented) racial groups, is empowering. By targeting power's self-interest, we can push for lasting changes, not just momentary victories.

We don't wait for racism to fade away. We don't wait for my family to become less afraid of Black people. We first remove the laws and policies keeping the races unequal, then people's fears will go away.

It's a serious responsibility, but it gives me hope. Because it makes the work more concrete: Not asking people to hold hands and sing together, but winding down the police state. Investing more in schools, and less in prisons. Breaking up monopolies and pushing power and money into communities that have neither.

So I recommend this book to anyone, of any race or caste. It offers clarity and hope in equal measure, because we have to see how racist power works -- and how pervasive racist ideas are, in all groups -- if we are to dismantle it.

This is turning into a month of listening, for me.

After the controversy erupted over J.K. Rowling's statements on trans people, I realized how little I actually know about that side of human experience. Where did these new pronouns come from? What's the difference between transsexual (which has been around since I was a kid) and transgender? Why nonbinary?

So I decided to start with digging into pronouns. Because a) I'm a grammar nerd, and b) Getting more comfortable using new or different pronouns is a concrete action I can take, right now.

And I'm glad I did! This book is a delight, a quick read that doesn't skimp on the details.

For example, I had no idea of the controversy over generic he that raged in the US and UK over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Suffragettes like Susan B Anthony argued that if he covered women when it came to paying taxes and being arrested for crimes, then it covered them when it came to voting, too.

This passage, in particular, struck me as completely bad-ass:

If, for instance, in a penal law there are no feminine pronouns, women should be exempt from the penalties imposed. And if men are to represent woman in voting, let them represent her in all. If a wife commits murder let the husband be hung for it.

She (and suffragettes throughout the nineteenth century) lost that argument, and the argument that the fourteenth amendment covered women, since it used not he but persons and citizens.

Which is why the current discussion over the ERA -- where detractors insist the fourteenth amendment already covers women -- is so specious. There's hundreds of years of American jurisprudence that says otherwise. We absolutely need an explicit amendment that grants women full and equal rights.

As even this one example, shows, arguments over pronouns go back a long way.

Calls for a new "gender-neutral" pronoun go back three hundred years (!).

Use of the singular they in just that manner go back seven-hundred years! It was never accepted by grammarians, but it was used in print and daily speech all the time.

Baron traces all of this history -- the legalities of the generic he, the rise of new pronouns, etc -- and links it together, showing how the current debates about pronouns and trans rights echo debates we've had down the centuries. Every time, the side of "existing usage" is really on the side of weaponizing grammar to suppress certain populations.

That's a side I don't want to be on.

If you're at all curious about where the "new" pronouns have come from, and why using the right pronouns is so important, I highly encourage you to read this book.

Or if you're already onboard with explicitly asking for people's pronouns (and sharing your own), and just like language, I'd still recommend it, as a fantastic and informative read.

So: What's your pronoun? I'm he/him/his :)

Disappointingly, this is not the full original text. It's been trimmed down by almost half, and then padded out with other articles Houdini wrote.

Still, what's left behind is fascinating. Lots of great stories of scams and burglary, from using chewing gum to steal jewels to having a confederate hide in a checked trunk in order to steal from a "locked" luggage compartment. Many good story ideas buried in here.

You can see why Houdini was so fascinated by the techniques of thieves and con-men. So much of their work involved mis-direction and slight of hand, the same techniques he used as a magician.

You can also understand why he went after mediums and psychics so hard: They were using those same techniques of magic, but not presenting themselves as magicians.

Thus they were not only defrauding the public, but casting legitimate magicians like himself in a bad light. Because they were frauds, and so when they were discovered -- which they almost inevitably were -- they made reputable magicians like himself look like frauds, too. Better that he unmask them, to make the difference more distinct.

So, a good book, still, though far too short. I'll have to track down a complete version at some point.

This is the kind of American history I wish they'd taught me in school.

It's a story of intrigue, of diplomatic maneuvering between dozens of nations. Of military campaigns won and lost. Of peace betrayed and hope rekindled.

I would have eaten this stuff up. Did eat it up, when presented with the history of Europe in the Middle Ages or Japan's Edo Period or China's Warring States.

(Okay, so the latter two I only got exposed to via video games, not school, but still)

But teaching me this version of American history would have forced adults around me to acknowledge our part in this struggle. And most of the time, we were the villains.

We made treaties with Native American tribes, swearing to abide by some border line, and then promptly set about settling past that line. We struck deals with the leaders of individual villages and then insisted whole tribes adhere to them. And when those tribes refused to sign new treaties with us, establishing new boundary lines, we invaded, burned their villages to the ground, and slaughtered their people.

And Washington was at the heart of all of this.

As First President, he established the policy of buying Native American land when we could, and killing them all if they wouldn't sell. He also pushed them to become "civilized," which in his mind meant dropping their own culture -- including their sustainable agriculture, their religion, and their gender roles -- and adopting settler culture wholesale.

Why would he do this? Because he speculated in Native American land, buying up the "rights" to tracts that hadn't been formerly ceded by any tribe. He needed those boundary lines pushed back, that land cleared of Native Americans, and then settled by Europeans, if he was to recoup any profits.

This is the part of American history that has white squatters fighting both Native Americans and elites back east for their "right" to seize land.

The part that has our very first treaty under the Constitution negotiated with a Native American tribe.

The part that has Washington taking time out of the Revolutionary War to have three armies loot and pillage their way through Iroquios territory, destroying crops and peaceful towns as they went.

And its the part that shows the Native Americans as what they were: A free people, with their own politics and divisions, struggling to deal with the invasion of their lands. Some sought peace, some wanted to fight, and some moved rather than deal with the Europeans. But all of them thought of themselves as their own nations, with control over their own territory, and their own sovereign rights.

Something Washington never conceded to them, and he embedded that denial in our relationships with the tribes from the start.

This sort of history is complicated, and Calloway does an fantastic job sorting through it. Amazingly, he condemns Washington's mistakes without finger-wagging.

It's enough to relate them truthfully. The First President condemns himself.

We don't really talk about the dangers of monopoly in the United States anymore.

We praise it, if we're VCs investing in start-ups.

We acknowledge a history of it, safely confined to a long-gone Gilded Age.

But we don't discuss how much it dominates our current economy, or how much damage it does.

Which is strange, because fighting monopoly should be one thing the Right and the Left can agree on.

The Right should fight monopoly because it leads to giant corporations that centralize control of the economy. And centralized control -- whether in the form of an unelected Politburo, or an unelected Board of Directors -- should be one of the Right's worst fears.

The Left should fight monopoly because it concentrates power in the hands of owners and financial gamblers at the expense of workers. When the company you're trying to unionize against doesn't have any competitors, and controls billions of dollars of assets, it can afford to wait out any strike, or hire enough scabs to stay in business. And it's harder to organize across not just multiple states, but multiple countries, to ensure a strike even gets off the ground.

Notice I didn't say anything about consumers. It turns out our obsession with consumer rights (and low prices) has crippled our ability to talk about the rights of producers, of the workers and small-businesspeople that should rightfully be the backbone of our economy. It's left us defenseless against the new monopolies in our midst, that charge less not because of some "economy of scale" but because they have access to enough capital to underbid everyone else.

Think of Amazon, and how it spent decades without turning any kind of profit, all while its stock rose and rose. Would any normal business have been allowed to do that? Any sane business? No. Amazon was allowed to pursue its monopoly, and won it.

But I didn't see any of this until after reading Matt Stoller's book.

I felt some of it, sure. In the way Silicon Valley companies chased advertising dollars instead of solving real problems. In how Uber and Amazon set their prices artificially low, specifically to drive their competitors out of the market, and got praised for it.

And in the way I've come to look at running my own business as some kind of crazy dream, instead of the normal out-growth of a career spent in engineering.

Stoller's given me a framework, and a history, to understand all of this. How we used to enforce anti-trust laws that would have stopped Facebook from buying out all of its competition, or Amazon from driving local bookstores out of business. How the financial markets used to exist to enable small businesses to get off the ground, not pour money into multinational behemoths that crushed them.

And how it all funnels money and power up the food chain, leading to today's rampant inequality and distorted economy.

If you have any interest in economic justice, whether as a devoted capitalist or a socialist or just a plain liberal, I'd recommend reading Goliath. Stoller's book restores the lost history of American anti-trust, placing us back in a historical context of the long fight between centralized control and distributed power.

It's the one book I've read about recent events that's given me hope.

Because we cut down the Goliaths once. We can do so again.

I was raised by racists.

Not cross-burners and Klan members, but racists all the same.

My mother sat my sister and I down when we were in middle-school, telling us not to date anyone outside our race. She posed it as a problem of us being "accepted as a couple," but the message was clear.

My older cousins would crack one-liners about the noise a chainsaw makes when you start it up being "Run n-----, n-----, run." They thought it was hilarious.

The joke books my parents bought me when I showed an interest in comedy never mentioned Latinos, only "Mexicans," and only when they were the butt of the joke, sometimes being thrown from airplanes by virtuous (read "white") Texans.

When I grew older, I rejected this casual racism, just as I rejected my family's religion and their politics. I thought I was free of prejudice. I thought my generation would grow up and replace the older racists in charge. That it was only a matter of time before racism was over.

Then Barack Obama was elected President. My wife and I watched the returns come in together, excited to see it happen. A Democrat back in office. And a black man. We'd done it!

Only we hadn't. My family's racism went from casual to angry. Their party turned, too, going from dog-whistling Dixie to embracing white nationalists.

Taking a knee at a ball game became an act of utmost disrespect, because a black man did it. A Republican Governor's plan for decreasing health care costs became "death panels," because a black man embraced it.

It blindsided me, this vitriol. I wasn't prepared for it, didn't know how to handle it.

Of course, minorities had always known it was there. They'd been living it, their whole lives.

So I've been trying to listen more. Both in person, and by seeking out books that will teach me.

Here's three I've read recently that have shaken me out of my complacency, and showed me some of the structure of American racism. A structure I hadn't been able to see before, because it was never meant to hold me in.

Just millions of my fellow citizens.

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The book that first opened my eyes to the constraints and the artificiality of "white" and "black." Powerfully, movingly written, it showed me how the American conception of race has been used to divide and oppress.

It also pushed me to question my own whiteness, and to look back to a time when I would not have been considered "white." My family's Irish and Blackfoot; for most of American history I would have been excluded from "white" society.

That doesn't mean I have any special insight into what African-Americans have been through and continue to experience. Rather, it taught me that whiteness or blackness has nothing to do with skin color, and everything to do with power and hierarchy. It is, fundamentally, about perpetuating injustice.

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander

I've written about this one before, and the effect it had on me.

Before reading it, I had no idea just how lucky I was to have gone through life without ending up in jail. That I didn't, even though I was raised poor, is not a testament to my behavior, but an indicator of my acceptance as "white" by American society.

White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo

A hard book to read, but a necessary one. Breaks down the reasons why even well-meaning "white" people like me get defensive and lash out if their racism is called out.

It's hard to write that sentence, to own the fact that though I consider all people to be equal, and don't consiously hold any prejudice, there are things I will do and say that will hurt and offend people. And that while I cannot prevent the fact that I will make mistakes, I must be open to having those mistakes called out, and be willing to be better.

It's the hardest lesson for me to learn. Because it's one thing to have your eyes opened to the bad behavior of others. Another to realize that you're part of the problem, and if you don't become more aware, and less defensive, it's not going to get better.

A frustrating and ultimately disappointing book, with some flashes of insight.

Let's start with the good things.

Chua's argument that US foreign policy often operates blind to ethnic tensions in other countries, which leads to horrible mistakes, is spot-on. The chapters looking back at past conflicts through that lens are informative; I never realized there was a racial element in the Vietnam war, for example (most of the wealth of the country was controlled by an ethnic-Chinese minority, before the war). And I didn't realize how much the Taliban are an ethnic group (majority come from one tribe) rather than purely a religious movement.

She also has some good points to make about how tribalism operates in the US, with each group feeling attacked on a daily basis.

But her prescription for fixing things boils down to "talk to each other," because she's also missed some fundamental things in her analysis.

Over and over again, she talks about the "historically homogeneous" countries of Europe and East Asia, contrasting them with the "unique" experience of the United States as "the world's only supergroup."

Never mind that no country is, or has ever been, ethnically homogeneous. Never mind that ethnicity itself is, like race, an invented concept, something we pulled out of a hat and pretended was real.

And never mind that the US is not unique in being a society made up of immigrants plus an oppressed aboriginal population.

So she can't say more than "we should talk to each other," because she has no sense of how every "ethnic state" was created by violence and death. That Germany (!) was not ripe for post-war democracy through some accident of ethnic purity, but was purged of other groups deliberately by the country's government and people. That even the concept of being "German" or "French" or "Chinese" is an invented thing, something hammered into people by a government that wanted them to stop being Provençal or Bavarians or Hmong.

And that the United States has never been a peaceful supergroup, but a vehicle for a group of people that call themselves "white" to ethnically cleanse and oppress all others. The "good old days" of "group blindness" she pines for in the final chapters never existed.

So she can't see ethnicity itself as the problem, because she takes it as a given, a fixed construct. A solution where we break down the concepts of "white" and "black" into their components, or ditch them altogether to adopt identities built around our cities and states, can't even be conceived in her framework.

Which is too bad, because her book is otherwise well-argued. We need her type of analysis, to be sure, but we also need more awareness of history, of how the divisions we take to be absolute today were invented, and can be remade.

Is there anything better than opening a book to find the author is speaking directly to you? It's like discovering an old friend you've never met before. Someone you just click with, who warms every cockle of your old heart.

That's what I felt, reading Bird by Bird.

Lamott's willing to be vulnerable, to show not only her worries and her fears, but also her jealousies and her anger, her depression and her rage. It makes the book feel more human, to me, than other writing advice books. More humble.

And more realistic. Lamott insists over and over again that writing is wonderful, that when the words come together it's one of the greatest joys she's ever known, but that doing the work needs to be enough on its own, because publishing -- whether getting rejected repeatedly, or getting accepted and dealing with the disappointment that comes when your work doesn't get the attention you crave -- is not the path to happiness for a writer.

So for her, it's the triumph of getting in the day's word count that matters. Or the knowledge that the book you wrote for your dying father was done before they passed, so they got to read it. Or the thought that writing about your own struggles, your own pain, can help someone else who's going through the same thing.

For me, her book has been like a stay in a remote cabin with a good friend. Relaxing, conversational, but also deep and moving. I've already incorporated a lot of the techniques she advocates, from focusing on getting one single thing down to staying in the chair until the words come.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

It's difficult to think of myself as privileged.

Growing up, our family car was one donated to us by the local church, because we couldn't afford one.

The only house we could afford was one at the very end of a dirt road so badly cut out of the weeds that the school bus wouldn't go down it, so I had to walk a mile or so to where the dirt track met a farm road.

I always started the school year with sore feet, because we couldn't buy new clothes for me, and last year's sneakers, once so roomy, were now so tight that I couldn't run in them, lest my arches feel like they were breaking.

But I was privileged, even though I didn't know it at the time.

When I was 16, and walking home from work after midnight, the cops didn't stop and frisk me. They didn't arrest me for breaking curfew. They didn't demand proof of the job that kept me out, proof I could not have provided right then, in the dark, on the street.

Instead, they drove me home.

When I was in college, smoking weed in a parked car, the police didn't come up on me in the night, rip me from the vehicle, and put me away for possession and intention to distribute.

And as an adult now, if I change lanes without signaling, or do a California Roll through a stop sign, I don't have to worry about the police doing anything more than giving me a ticket, if they even decide to pull me over.

If any of these things had happened to me, my life would have been derailed. My job working for the federal government could not have happened. I would not have been able to finish college. I would have been branded a criminal, and locked out of the upward mobility I've experienced.

I have been privileged, then, because I have been allowed to succeed.

But millions of Americans with a skin color different from mine are not allowed. And it's something that was invisible to me, until very recently.

I didn't know that the police have the power to stop and frisk anyone they even suspect of being engaged in illegal drug activity. That they can give the most implausible of reasons to search someone, or their car, or their luggage, without a warrant. And that given this immense power, they choose to use it not on the majority of criminals who are of European descent, but on African- and Hispanic-Americans.

It frightens me, to think of how lucky I was not to be caught up in the Drug War. And it worries me, to see the same excuses that have been used for thirty years to lock up millions of African-Americans now turned onto those trying to enter this country in search of a better life for their families: They're branded criminals, stripped of rights because they supposedly came in "the wrong way," told they're "jumping the line" and have only themselves to blame for the hardships they face once they're here.

It's lies, all of it, and it breaks my heart that my own family, who in a different century would have been the subject of the same lies, swallows them whole.

If this conception of privilege surprises you, if you know that most criminals are dark-skinned but think poverty is to blame, or if you think justice in the United States is in any way color-blind, then I urge you to read this book.

The New Jim Crow is not a polemic. It is not a screed. It is a well-research, well-written account of how we've given the police enormous powers in the name of winning the Drug War, and they've turned them on the most vulnerable and most oppressed segment of our society. It's essential reading, especially as we enter a new election cycle and debate what sort of government we want.

News

And to a professional, SFWA-qualifying market, no less!

More details as they shake out, but I’m over-the-moon pumped. The story’s one I’ve been working on for three years (!), revising, polishing, and submitting.

Many thanks to my friends that suffered through reading all those drafts, and offered me the feedback I needed to make the story shine!

Reviews

Persian Fire, by Tom Holland

And it illuminated aspects of ancient Persia and Greece that I didn’t appreciate before. Like how Sparta trumpeted equality for everyone except for those living in the cities they conquered (who were turned into slaves, one and all). Or how democratic Athens regularly held an ostracism, so they could kick out a citizen who was getting too powerful (or causing too much resentment among other citizens). Or that the King of Persia considered all his subjects his slaves, and yet left them to worship their own gods, and mostly govern themselves, so long as they paid tribute.

I wish it’d gone more into a subject it teases in the Preface: How would Greece have fared if Xerxes had conquered it? Given that the Persian Kings were considering letting the Ionians (subjects of the empire) govern themselves democratically, how much of Western history would have been different?

Holland does go into detail about the Persian empire (origins, revolutions, etc), which is a great corrective to the usual Greek-sided way of telling this story. But he leaves one of his most tantalizing questions unexplored, which is a tragedy.

Paper Girls, Vol 1, by Brian K Vaughn, Cliff Chiang, Matt Wilson, and Jared K Fletcher

And now I have yet another Image Comic (like Monstress, and Saga, and Wicked + Divine, and…) that I’ll pick up every chance I get.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that it’s set in 1988, it follows four pre-teens on their paper route one early morning, and that things rapidly get…weird. Like, time-travel and possible aliens and dinosaurs weird.

It’s fantastically well-done. Its creative team is firing on all cylinders: the story is strong, the drawing clear and easy-to-follow, the colors manage to invoke both the 80s (to me, anyway) and the various locations (early morning outside, dark basement, etc) and the lettering conveys everything from a radio’s static to a drunken warble.

Which reminds me, I need to go pick up Vol 2 :)

So I’ve given myself homework.

I decided to take the list of books the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook uses for examples of good writing, whittle them down to the ones whose excerpts intrigued me, and read them all.

I figure I’ll discover some new authors, learn some new techniques, and get exposed to genres I wouldn’t normally read in.

First up: Empire Falls

Motivation

I was also intrigued because it broke out in a big way: it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. So not only did it make it seem possible to eventually write a good book, it means it’s possible to work hard at it, and write a great one.

Breaking it Down

Point of View

In other words, it’s all told in third-person, and mostly sticks close to one character’s thoughts and perspective during a chapter, but will occasionally jump over to someone else for a paragraph, then come back. Oh, and also the author’s voice sometimes comes in, to render a judgement on someone’s personality.

It works, though it breaks all kinds of rules.

Writing Style

Overall effect is like an AMC show from around 2006: deliberately slow and relaxed pacing. As if there’s no final destination in mind, so there’s no reason to rush off there.

Breakout Techniques

And the plot threads are tightly woven. All that backstory has knock-on effects decades later, and Russo manages to pull otherwise random events together and make it all match up.

That said, “tension on every page” is something the book doesn’t have. If anything, there’s a complete lack of tension. It made reading it rather relaxing, oddly enough; hanging out with the sad sacks of Empire Falls after a stressful day at work felt like unwinding.

Re-readability

I appreciate the mastery of technique here; no dispute about the Pulitzer. But the technique is in service of a story that I don’t want to read again.

It makes me think: if I could write that well about something with more action, more movement, how much fun would that be?

Picked this one up during my last trip through Boston. I’m inching closer and closer to forty, so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I’ve accomplished so far in my life (not much, really) and where I might want to go from here.

I’d hoped this book would help with that, or at least with countering any fears or anxieties I experience as I enter middle age.

Unfortunately, it’s a mostly disappointing book.

An Audience of One

Part of that is due to a flaw he admits right up front: it’s a book he wrote for himself. Someone who’s entered middle age as one of the professional classes, with a stable job, a stable home life, and good health. And not just any job, but the job he set out to get in his twenties. So he comes at middle age from the perspective of someone who’s already achieved the things they wanted out of life.

The book suffers for it. For how many of us set out to do one thing in our youth, only to end up somewhere entirely different? Or enter middle age with our bodies broken, or our minds? Do we have nothing to learn from philosophy?

Abandoning Reason

The second flaw follows directly from the first: he discusses arguments for dealing with certain aspects of middle age, such as the fear of death, but dismisses anything that doesn’t feel right for him. Abandoning reason, he moves from philosophy to pop psychology, deciding that what gives him the most comfort must be the best.

Never mind that what might comfort him would be appalling to someone else. Or that comfort might have little to do with the truth.

Paths Not Taken

And so he glosses over the insights embedded in the not-self dogma of Buddhism. Skips right over the most reasonable argument for not fearing death. And misses a gaping hole in the middle of his whole argument.

For embedded in the heart of his book is an assumption: that philosophy is meant to help us be happy.

But what if that isn’t the case? If we take philosophy as being the study of how to live a good life, does it necessarily follow that the good life is a happy one?

I don’t think so. At the very least, I don’t think it’s something we can assume. For while it is a modern trend to conflate happiness with virtue (or perhaps merely a particularly American one), there are plenty of examples from ancient philosophy where that isn’t the case. Consider Stoicism, where virtue can only be shown in the face of adversity.

Final Words

So while Midlife claims to be a mix of philosophy and self-help, it is neither. Not philosophy, because it leaves reason behind in the pursuit of comfortable aphorisms. And not self-help, because it was written to help only one person, the author.

Frustrating at its worst, disappointing at its best, I wouldn’t recommend this book.

Masterful. Not only did I get a better sense of who Cicero was as a person, and why he was important, I also got a good feel for the politics of the late Roman Republic. More specifically, Everitt lays out the flaws inherent in the Roman system that – coupled with the stubborn refusal to change of most Senators – led to its downfall and the birth of the Empire.

I found this book easier going than Everitt’s biography of Augustus. They’re both good, don’t get me wrong, but I never felt lost in dates and events in Cicero, because Everitt constantly tied things back to the larger movements of the period. It gave me a better perspective, and also let me see how important Cicero really was.

For example, after watching the HBO series Rome (which is fantastic, highly recommend checking it out), I thought of Cicero as little more than a pompous windbag, unable to make up his mind or stand for anything.

On the contrary, while he could be long-winded, and tended to talk up his deeds too much, he was a capable administrator (he was only sent to govern provinces twice, but both times was very popular with the locals for being competent and incorruptible) and a rare thing in the late Republic: a Senator that sided with the wealthy (optimates) but wanted to change things just the same. Not to mention his original claim to fame as a great orator, which he won by ably defending clients in the courts.

He even, apparently, had some skill as an investigator. While on his second tour as a provincial governor, he uncovered a banking scandal that was being run by Marcus Brutus (the Brutus that later was one of Caesar’s assassins!).

In short: Highly recommended if you’re interested in Roman history, or even (like me) just curious to know more about the personalities glimpsed through series like Rome.

Recently finished reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.

It’s hard for me to talk about, because the book is filled with such piercing, clear-eyed insight, that if I tried to summarize it properly, I’d end up reproducing it.

I could say that I think the book should be required reading for any citizen of any country, in any age, because I do. And not because of any simplistic need to show that “Nazis are bad,” which (while true) doesn’t need an entire book to demonstrate. The testimony of even one concentration camp survivor should be enough for that.

I think everyone should read The Origins of Totalitarianism because it shows how the logic of totalitarian governments grows out of capitalism itself. Not that capitalism must always lead to totalitarianism, but that it always can. Just as racism and nationalism don’t always lead to a Final Solution, but without racism and nationalism, without some ideology claiming to override our humanity, a Final Solution is not even conceivable.

And yes, I think there are passages of the book, describing the methods of the Nazis and the communists (for Stalin’s government was also a totalitarian one) that are too close to our current administration for my comfort. I can’t read about the Nazis contempt for reality, or the way people in totalitarian movements will both believe the lies told by their leaders and praise them for their cleverness when the lies are revealed, without thinking of how right-wing nationalists in my own country treat the current President. But even if these things were not happening in the United States, it would be a book worth reading.

It is, in short, rightly called a classic. A long one, and a hard one, if we take its insights to heart as readers (passages calling out the middle classes for abandoning their civic duties for isolated home life strike close to home for me; I feel I’ve worked hard for what I have, and want to cling to it, but how many others am I leaving behind, by doing so?).

And yet it is that wondrous thing: a book hailed as a classic work, that is worth all the time and study we can give it. If you haven’t read it, please do.

We’re counting on you.

Ever read a book that makes you feel both better and worse about the times you live in?

That’s what Fantasyland did for me.

Better, because Andersen shows how the current fad for conspiracy theories and disregard for facts (on the conservative side of politics, this time) is just the latest iteration of a series of such fads, going all the way back to the first Northern European settlers of the Americas.

For example: the first colonists in Virginia were lured by rumors of gold that had been completely made up by speculators. They starved and died while hunting for gold and silver, until by chance they started cultivating America’s first addictive drug export, tobacco.

But I also feel worse, in that it makes me think there’s no real escape from the fanaticism and illusions that lie in the heart of the American experiment. They’ve allowed the burning of witches, the enslavement of entire nations, and the genocide of those who were here first. And now they’re pushing even my own family to condone the caging of immigrant children, the silencing of women, and the persecution of Muslims.

It’s disheartening, to say the least.

I take hope in the other side of the cycle that Andersen exposes. When reason pushes back against mysticism, and we re-fight the battles of the Enlightenment. We banned snake-oil and established the FDA. We drove quacks underground and wrote licensing laws. We won the Civil War. We passed Civil Rights legislation.

Granted, Andersen himself doesn’t seem to think there’s light at the end of our present tunnel. At the end of the book, he falls into what I think is a trap: believing the United States to be completely unique, and the current era to be uniquely terrible.

I think the first is countered with any glance at the news from the rest of the world. From Brexit to the rise of the populist right in Poland and Hungary, to Venezuala’s deluded leadership and China’s reality-scrubbed media, there’s plenty of other countries with their own fantasylands. While we in the U.S. often tell ourselves we’re not like anyone else, it turns out we are.

And I think his own book is a firm counter to the second trap. Every era thinks itself both the pinnacle of human achievement and the lowest depth to which humanity can fall. But pushing back against unreason – by refusing to give them a platform, by taking their threat seriously but not their claims, by not falling for the trap of treating every belief as equally valid – has worked in the past. It can work now.

Intense.

The prose is stripped clean of excess, going down so smooth it injects the story right into your bloodstream. And hot damn, it’s a good one.

I haven’t read a lot of YA, but this is the first one I enjoyed, start to finish.

Three things I learned about writing:

• First-person, step-by-step, can be brutal: by sitting right inside the character’s head, it’s easy to get sucked in, and then when the shit goes down, you feel every victory and defeat like they’re happening to you.
• Every group has a jerk. Every group in fiction needs a jerk.
• One way to handle writing a large group, where each person needs their own personality, is to write scenes in which the group rotates through different configurations. The numbers stay manageable, but the composition of the group in the scene changes, giving each member a chance to shine.

Not what I expected. I’d always thought the Meditations was a set of philosophical aphorisms. Instead, it’s something between a diary and a daily “deep thought”, a recording of a conversation an Emperor of Rome was having with himself.

As such, it’s repetitive and very personal, and yet somehow still relevant, hundreds of years after it was written.

Three things I found useful:

• Try to learn from everyone, even (especially) the ones you disagree with.
• If you know someone’s a jerk, don’t expect them to treat you fairly. And definitely don’t get angry with them for it, since you knew who they were from the start.
• Success and failure happen to everyone, over and over again. So there shouldn’t be pride in the former, or shame in the latter.

Not what I expected. Written in plain language, as if he wanted to sound trustworthy, so the reader wouldn’t notice the (non-glorious) things he skips over.

Fascinating to read now, after I know more about both what happened to Caesar afterwards and the Gauls he attacked.

Three things I learned:

• Caesar’s mercy started during the Gaul campaign, when he’d often pardon former enemies that were willing to bend the knee.
• Caesar justified his attacks on the rest of Gaul and Germany on a domino theory: if the Germans prospered in Gaul, he said, they’d eventually march on Rome itself.
• The Pullo and Vorenus from HBO’s Rome were based on real people, that Caesar wrote about by name (!)

Illuminating. Everitt makes Augustus a sympathetic figure, but without hiding any of his flaws: his hypocritical championing of family values, his slaughtering of competing Roman families, his unforgiving behavior towards his own family and friends. And he shows how Augustus' life was often a series of serious mistakes followed by lucky victories, not a steady calculated rise to power.

Three things I learned:

• The idea of having two "co-emperors" of Rome goes back to Augustus. He often had at least one trusted friend or family member invested with equal power and sent to rule different regions of the empire.
• Augustus' first official post was religious: his great-uncle Caesar, got him appointed to the College of Pontiffs, who were in charge of performing public sacrifices
• Augustus was called "Princeps", not Emperor. He was careful to keep his powers legal, renewed periodically via legislation, and to act humble while in Rome

Essential. Maas describes the elements of a “breakout” novel, showing how to make any plot or story more compelling. He pulls examples from recent (well, recent to the year 2000, which is when the book was written) novels to illustrate each of his points, and even has exercises in each chapter you can do for your own novel.

I’m already mixing in his approach as I prepare for NaNoWriMo. It’s given me another set of questions to ask about my characters, plot, and setting, to help me push them to a higher level.

Three things I learned about writing:

• People have been talking about the death of the mid-list since the 1970s. Don't let it phase you.
• Escalating stakes doesn't mean making the one danger greater. It means adding more, different, dangers for the protagonist.
• Characters need to be larger-than-life. Find the extraordinary in ordinary people, and bring that to life.

Masterful. It’s a classic for a reason: a locked-room mystery on an entire train, that builds slowly through lie after lie until the truth comes rushing out all at once.

Damn, but Christie was good.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Skip over the dialog that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's enough just to say "so-and-so made a suitable response."
• Even adventures that get stumbled into have to be driven by the protagonist's choices. Poirot doesn't ask for the mystery, but he deliberately pursues it to the end, because that's who he is.
• Put the description at the start of the scene, briefly. If the position of something isn't important, leave it out. It's enough to report that "there were pencils and paper," we don't always need to know exactly where everything is.

A cracking good read. Illuminates the relationship between Gen X and Gen Y, something that’s always felt a little slippery to me (as someone born in 1979, often thrown in with the Millennials but identifying with Gen X).

Filled with moments that made me nod along (the movie list for Gen X), and others that showed me a corner of the 90s I didn’t know existed (Sassy magazine). The book was clearly a work of love for both Eve and Leonora, and it shows.

Three things I learned:

• Titanic was a huge movie for Gen Y. What I remember as just solid Oscar-bait was apparently perfectly tuned to imprint on young Gen Y brains.
• Clueless can be read as not just a great adaption of Emma, but also as a love story between Gen Y (Cher) and Gen X (Josh), reflecting the complicated relationship between the two generations.
• Complaining about the current tech-driven dating scene is common to Gen Y, though none of them would want to go back to the way things were before.

Stunning. I had no idea of the magnitude of what was lost in Eastern and Central Europe after the War, due to Soviet coercion and control.

By focusing on just the first decade or so after V-E day, and restricting her story to mainly Poland, East Germany, and Hungary, Applebaum is able to go in deep on how the Soviets – and their local communist allies – were able to subvert their newly conquered satellite states, and impose a foreign totalitarian system on them.

Three things I learned:

• Poland, Hungary, Germany, Finland: their borders were radically remade after the Soviet conquest. The Baltic countries vanished altogether, absorbed into the Soviet Union. Germany lost much eastern territory to Poland, who in turn lost its eastern reaches to the Soviet Union. The Ukraine was gone.
• Poland lost 20% of its population in the war. In comparison, France lost 1.5%
• The first step for most of the communist parties was to form a "national front" with other leftist parties, sometimes by force, usually with some amount of arm-twisting. Once that was established, communists would take over the mechanisms of state power (Interior, Secret Police, etc) while leaving the most visible positions in the hands of others, so it looked like a pluralistic government from outside.

Generally excellent. Where the first book was broad, with multiple locations and times, the second one goes deep, diving into the political minutiae of a single system. And it works, drawing us further into the world of the Radch.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Be careful of "I knew that she suspected I thought I knew about this lie that she told me three days ago" plots. Unless your narrator is very explicit about their thoughts, you can lose the reader in too many significant looks that aren't explained.
• If a cool gimmick from the first book isn't available (lost because of story), instead of bringing it back (and reaching for a retcon), try to find a different way to achieve the same thing. Here, the data relayed to the narrator by Ship gives us the ability to view scenes we wouldn't otherwise, preserving the narrative trick of the first book by a different means.
• For a sequel, you might be tempted to go broader than the first book (especially if the story of the first book was epic in scope already). But you don't have to. A smaller scope can work just as well to let you show who your characters are, and deepen their relationships.

Revelatory, especially when paired with Year Zero. Sebestyen shows how the Cold War began, so soon after the Allies won. Cracks between the Big Three (US, Britain, Soviet Union) that had been papered over for the sake of the war quickly grew into major rifts.

Three of the countless things I learned:

• The Soviet Union didn't steal the entire atomic bomb. Their stolen intelligence helped them move faster, by perhaps two years, but their scientists did the majority of the work themselves.
• Mao financed his armies and kept his population fed during the Chinese Civil War by growing and selling opium (!)
• Japan had been bombed far worse than Germany. Many millions lost their homes. 80% of its merchant shipping fleet was gone. Half of its agricultural land was waste. In the months after the war, Allied survey teams discovered Japan could not have carried on much longer than it did.

Wicked and Divine, Vol 4: Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. It’s back. Swallowed this one whole in about an hour. Need more.

The Vision, Vol 1: Art is…fuzzy? Seems like the lines are never sharp. Which is maybe deliberate, since it’s a fuzzy-line world they’re creating. But it’s hard on the eyes.

Constantly narrated via voice-over, instead of using dialog or pictures to show what’s happening. It’s a fine technique, and a known one, but it’s a bit tedious when it’s all the comic is written in.

Deadly Class, Vol 3: When did everyone become pretentious and annoying?

Saga, Vol 5: Artwork still fantastic, writing keeps me reading, but…did anything really happen? Threads wound up rather easily, it seems, and Fiona was ripped away again kind of arbitrarily. Also: too much time spent with the bounty hunters I don’t care about.

Illuminating. Filled a gap in my understanding of the war, of the year between the Allied victory and the rebuilding that followed.

Thankfully, Buruma doesn’t just cover what happened in Europe. He looks everywhere, from the Netherlands to Indonesia to Japan and China. A true history of the fallout from the last world war.

Three things I learned:

• The Soviets stripped their territories, both European and Asian, of industry. Whole factories were broken down and shipped into the Soviet Union, from Poland to Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
• Jews in Poland were not safe after the war. Those who managed to find a home to come back to still faced discrimination and pogroms. Over a thousand Jews were murdered in Poland in the year after liberation.
• British military was complicit in the deaths of thousands, as it sent captured anti-communists back to the Soviet Union to be slaughtered (men, women, and children).

Simply put, a fantastic ghost story. Like a horror film from the 80s updated and put in novel form.

Three things I learned about writing:

• 3rd person omniscient works only if you stay out of characters' individual perspectives. Say what happens, and report what they think, but as an outsider
• Tragedy for a minor character has more impact if we spend some time with them first, however little, to see how they act normally
• Remember that characters only know what they see, and that can mislead them sometimes. That's okay. Let them be wrong when they should be wrong, so that when they're right it'll feel like triumph.

Revelatory. Mann’s 1491 opened my eyes to the many civilizations that existed in the Americas before Columbus landed. 1493 has shown me just how much of our current world was created in the aftermath of his voyages.

Three of the many, many things I learned:

• The lynchpin of the global trade of American silver for Chinese porcelain and silks was the Philippines. That's where Spanish traders first ran into Chinese junks, in the early sixteenth century.
• One theory for the causes of the Little Ice Age: the sudden reforestation of the Americas from the millions of native inhabitants that died out from European diseases.
• China is the world's largest producer of sweet potatoes, and the second-largest producer of maize. Both crops are native to the Americas.

Another classic that I just never got around to reading before.

And it’s deservedly a classic. Dickens absolutely skewers the ruling classes of three societies: his native England, pre-Revolutionary France, and the post-Revolutionary Terror. The snarky political commentary makes his dips into melodrama excusable.

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can write in the third-person POV without insight into any characters' thoughts or feelings at all, only their actions and words.
• Admitting that there is a narrator telling the story (while standing outside of it) gives you a chance to comment on the action, not just tell it.
• Even if readers can anticipate a turn in the story, if the characters don't know it's on its way, you can generate tension just in putting off the moment that that event happens.

A nice, quick intro to the physical infrastructure of the internet. Doesn’t really go into how all those pieces work – there’s no discourse on the technology behind a router – but does build a mental image of the boxes, buildings, and people that keep the world connected.

Three things I learned:

• ARPAnet's first Internet Message Processing machine was installed at UCLA in 1969. The machines were manufactured on the East Coast, but only West Coast universities were open to the idea of the network at the time.
• In 1998, The Netherlands passed two laws to pave the way for fiber everywhere. One law required landowners to give up right of way for holes to be dug, second law required any company digging a hole to lay fiber to also let other companies lay their own cable in the same hole and share the costs. The one-two punch made it cheaper and easier to lay fiber, and also blocked anyone getting a monopoly.
• The busiest route in the world is between London and New York, with more internet traffic than any other line.

Fantastically well-done. Weaves together magic, fairies, Great War trauma, romance, sisterly rivalry, and the treatment of special-needs children into one cracking good story.

So very happy to discover there are sequels.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Dribble out your backstory. At the start, offer just enough to explain the choices that brought the character to that point. Introduce the rest later, as needed for the story.
• You can get away with a romance between two characters that have little in common if you make their raw attraction clear and compelling.
• Sometimes the greatest climaxes (or turns in the story) happen when the protagonist realizes something about themselves that they didn't know before.

Another strong portrayal of a villain from Grossman.

Avoids the trap of completely rehabilitating Nixon. He’s sympathetic without being likable, and interesting to follow without the reader always cheering them on.

Loses steam in the second half. There’s plot lines that go nowhere, scenes that could have been cut without changing anything, and the climax happens completely off-screen, with no buildup or release of tension.

Still, I learned a few things about writing:

• Delivering most of your plot via dialog -- so long as you're not data dumping -- can be a great way to keep the story moving.
• The best villains think they're the hero.
• Restricting your book to one POV can be too confining. Multiple POV can let you explore other aspects of your world, which you might need if your story takes place somewhere very different.

A 1990s trenchcoats-and-mirrorshades action film published in the 21st century with 1950s gender roles. An odd, frustrating, throwback of a book.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Be careful when porting an old genre to a new skin. Bringing along the social mores along with the other elements will make your book feel dated from the start.
• Taking an otherwise-competent character and pushing them out of their element is a great way to both explore a new world and make it challenging for them.
• In sci-fi, it's not enough that the names of things -- computers, cars, etc -- change. Our relationship with them needs to change, too, or it's just window dressing.

Basically perfect. It’s low-key, character-driven sci-fi, stuffed with cool ideas and diverse cultures. Completely scratched my Firefly itch, in a good way :)

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Can think of chapters as episodes of a TV series, with cuts between multiple points of view, similar beats, and cliffhanger endings.
• Having the Shit Go Down at the end of the book rather than the beginning gives the reader time to know and care for the characters, making it more tense.
• You can get away with an infinite amount of info-dumping if it's a knowledgeable character explaining things to a clueless character.

Disappointing.

Starts out well, action pumping and character backstories fleshed out just enough to make you care, but not enough to stop the flow of the story.

But the world around them never congeals for me, and the atmosphere of threat and double-cross the story needs can’t happen without it.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Switching perspective characters early on is a great opportunity to give more context to what's happening, since it's another angle on the world
• In a modern setting, you really can cut descriptions down to the bone, to put the focus on dialog and action
• Can do character backstory in a single chapter, covering years of someone's life, with breaks in-between

Fantastic. Absolutely nails the smugness and insincerity of the South, along with the surprise of finding help in unexpected places. Protagonist is a perfect mix of insecurity and snark.

Thank the gods it’s a series; can’t wait to read the next one.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Narrating a character's internal debate in long-form is fine, so long as it's in the right place: when the character is away from other people. Don't do it during dialog.
• You don't need dialect to write Southern characters. Getting their facial expressions and hypocrisy right is enough.
• Finding a real-life struggle that mirrors the fantasy one is a good way to ground it.

Exasperating. With the exception of The Faery Handbag, none of the supposed stories in this collection actually contain a story at all. Some of them contain multiple stories, nested and incomplete, but most are just character and setting with a complete lack of anything happening. Ever. For page after page.

Possibly the worst short story collection I’ve ever read.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Story is supreme. Choose your words well, but make telling a good story your first priority.
• Deliver on your promises to the reader. If you promise zombies, give them some damn zombies.
• If your story can be summed up in a single sentence, maybe it doesn't need to be an entire novel.

Masterful. Incredibly well-crafted series of nested narratives that simultaneously did a deep dive into Dracula lore and sucked me into a single family’s generations-long saga. Just…wow. So well done.

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can use flashbacks to cover over narrative time that would otherwise be boring, like train (or plane) travel
• To make an old myth feel fresh, look for the side that's not usually given a starring role (like the Turkish side of the Dracula legend), and explore it.
• Journals and letters are a great way to both nest stories, and keep each story personal, told by the person that lived it

It’s got an elderly kick-ass demon-assassin, zombies that can think, and a death goddess working at a small press. For that, I can forgive the continuity errors and the occasional odd plot point.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Watch out for the vague "some": "something made her", "something told her", "some sort of sense"...it gets overused too easily.
• Where you start your story affects how sympathetic your protagonist seems. Start it when they're under stress, and readers automatically feel for them. Start it with them relaxed but complaining about how rough they've got it, and readers might not be as charmed.
• Vivid, brief descriptions and snappy dialog can pull a reader through the roughest parts of your story.

“Gothic” in the overwrought, melodramatic sense.

There’s some fantastic ideas in here, but it was tough one for me to finish.

Three things I learned about writing:

• People falling love notice everything about their beloved. If writing from the POV of a character falling in love, their thoughts will dwell on even insignificant details about their beloved.
• Constant repetition of unexplained magical elements makes them annoying and boring. Conserve the magic, to make it interesting.
• Use a deep dive into a character's thoughts during conversation sparingly. Dialog should speed the story along, interrupting the flow with paragraphs of thought undercuts momentum and frustrates readers.

Julia feels…rough.

There are parts I absolutely love, like the strong typing, the baked-in matrix operations, and the support for multi-type dispatch.

Then there’s the pieces that seem incomplete. Like the documentation, which is very extensive, but proved useless when trying to find out the proper way to build dictionaries in the latest version. Or the package system, which will install things right into a running repl (cool!) but does it without getting your permission for all its dependencies (boo).

All in all, I’d like to build something more extensive in Julia. Preferably something ML-related, that I might normally build in Python.

Day One

• can install with brew
• book written for 0.3, newest version is 0.5
• has a repl built in :)
• typeof for types
• "" for strings, '' only for single-chars
• // when you want to divide and leave it divided (no float, keep the fraction)
• has symbols
• arrays are typed, but can contain more than one type (will switch from char to any, for example)
• commas are required for lists, arrays, etc (boo)
• tuples: fixed sized bags of values, typed according to what they hold
• arrays carry around their dimensionality (will be important for matrix-type ops later on)
• has dictionaries as well
• hmm: typeof({:foo => 5}) -> vector syntax is discontinued
• Dicts have to be explicitly built now: Dict(:foo => 5) is the equivalent
• XOR operator with $
• bits to see the binary of a value
• can assign to multiple variables at once with commas (like python)
• trying to access an undefined key in a dict throws an error
• in can check membership of arrays or iterators, but not dictionaries
• but: can check for key and value in dict using in + pair of key, value: in(:a => 1, explicit)
• book's syntax of using tuple for the search is incorrect
• julia docs are really...not helpful :/
• book's syntax for set construction is also wrong
• nothing in the online docs to correct it
• (of course, nothing in the online docs to correct my Dict construction syntax, either)
• can construct Set with: Set([1, 2, 3])
• arrays are typed (Any for multiple types)
• array indexes start at 1, not 0 (!) [follows math here]
• array slices include the ending index
• can mutate index by assigning to existing index, but assigning to non-existing index doesn't append to the array, throws error
• array notation is row, column
• * will do matrix multiplication (means # of rows of first has to match # of columns of second)
• regular element-wise multiplication needs .*
• need a transpose? just add '
• very much like linear algebra; baked-in
• dictionaries are typed, will throw error if you try to add key/value to them that doesn't match the types it was created with
• BUT: can merge a dict with a dict with different types, creates a new dict with Any to hold the differing types (keys or values)

Day Two

• if..elseif...end
• if check has to be a boolean; won't coerce strings, non-boolean values to booleans (nice)
• reference vars inside of strings with $ prefix: println("$a")
• has user-defined types
• can add type constraints to user-defined type fields
• automatically gets constructor fn with the same name as the type and arguments, one per field
• subtype only one level
• abstract types are just ways to group other types
• no more super(), use supertype() -> suggested by compiler error message, which is nice
• functions return value of last expression
• ... to get a collection of args
• +(1, 2) -> yields 3, operators can be used as prefix functions
• ... will expand collection into arguments for a function
• will dispatch function calls based on the types of all the arguments
• type on pg 208: int() doesn't exist, it's Int()
• WARNING: Base.ASCIIString is deprecated, use String instead.
• no need to extend protocols or objects, classes, etc to add new functions for dispatching on core types: can just define the new functions, wherever you like, julia will dispatch appropriately
• avoids problem with clojure defmulti's, where you have to bring in the parent lib all the time
• julia has erlang-like processes and message-passing to handle concurrency
• WARNING: remotecall(id::Integer,f::Function,args...) is deprecated, use remotecall(f,id::Integer,args...) instead.
• (remotecall arg order has changed)
• randbool -> NOPE, try rand(Bool)
• looks like there's some overhead in using processes for the first time; pflip_coins times are double the non-parallel version at first, then are reliably twice as fast
• julia founders answered the interview questions as one voice, with no distinction between them
• whole section in the julia manual for parallel computing

Day Three

• macros are based off of lisp's (!)
• quote with :
• names fn no longer exists (for the Expr type, just fine for the Module type)
• use fieldnames instead
• unquote -> $
• invoke macro with @ followed by the args
• Pkg.add() will fetch directly into a running repl
• hmm...installs homebrew without checking if it's on your system already, or if you have it somewhere else
• also doesn't *ask* if it's ok to install homebrew
• not cool, julia, not cool
• even then, not all dependencies installed at the time...still needed QuartzIO to display an image
• view not defined
• ImageView.view -> deprecated
• imgshow does nothing
• docs don't help
• hmm...restarting repl seems to have fixed it...window is hidden behind others
• img no longer has data attribute, is just the pixels now
• rounding errors means pixels != pixels2
• ifloor -> floor(Int64, val) now
• works!

Disturbing. Most of the characters are completely unlikable, especially the men: the worst are outright misogynists and racists, even the best act like superior assholes to everyone else.

Mamatas doesn’t pull any punches in exposing the sexism and harassment that happens at fan conventions. It makes for tough reading, both because the female protagonist is constantly experiencing it and because the male narrator, whose death she’s investigating, is one of the superior assholes it’s hard to sympathize with.

Worth reading, though, if nothing else than as a “Do I act like this?” check.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• - Can get away with very skimpy descriptions -- or none at all -- if you choose the proper perspective to tell the story from (in this case, a corpse's).
• Protagonist's motivation for pursuing the mystery can be thin, if the reader's interest is piqued enough for them to want to see it solved
• Characters will always rationalize their behavior. Even when dead.

Beautiful. Simple, tight prose, telling a deeply moving story.

Can’t wait to read the next one.

Three things I learned about writing:

• What a society condemns is just as important to making it feel lived-in as what it praises.
• Characters don't always have to be imposing their will on the world. They can show their inner character by the opportunities they take advantage of, as well.
• In a world of bad choices and flawed people, heroes can be cruel and cowardly, and villains can show mercy.

A strong collection of stories. Connolly moves from near-future sci-fi to alternate world fantasy to present-day witches, populating each story with strong, unique characters.

Will definitely be picking up her novel, Seriously Wicked, which takes place in the same world as one my favorite stories from this collection.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• The thinner the story, the shorter the work should be. Don't make the reader wade through lots of background or context just to get to the heart of events.
• Writing in the present-day relieves you of a lot of world-building duties, lets you focus on creating great characters.
• Even stories told via journal entries (or texts, or emails) can have a proper buildup to a climax.

A cornucopia of female scientists and engineers that got left out of the history I learned in school.

It’s amazing how much these women accomplished considering how much was stacked against them. Time after time, in these biographies, I read how a brilliant scientist would be forced to work for free, because the university didn’t hire women. Often, they’d find employment in a German university, only to be kicked out once the Nazis took power and started firing Jewish scientists.

That kind of treatment would make me rebellious, want to stop my work completely and find something less important to do.

But these women persisted.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Grace Hopper was the first woman to graduate with a PhD in math from Yale. She invented the compiler, set the foundations for COBOL, and was considered so valuable to the Navy that she was called back from retirement to work another 19 years (!)
• When Einstein needed tutoring in the higher math he needed to pursue his theory of General Relativity, he turned to Emmy Noether, the inventor of abstract algebra. Through the course of teaching Einstein, she invented the equations needed to set General Relativity on a solid mathematical footing.
• Marie Tharp mapped 70% of the ocean floor, and discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. She insisted that it was confirmation of continental drift for years (and was fired for it!) before theory became accepted.

Frustrating and disappointing. Adams' writing is stuffed with metaphors, giving everything a dreamy quality that makes it hard to take anything seriously.

Didn’t help that I just came off reading Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books, which do a much better job of narrating a woman’s journey through a post-apocalyptic world.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• If readers already know the narrator survives a scene in a flashback, don't try to wring tension out of their survival.
• Readers need to know not only what your characters are doing, but why, if they're going to care.
• When writing a character from a different country, do several editing passes to be certain their dialog, analogies, and expressions all match where they're supposed to be from.

Prescient, gripping, and intimidatingly good. Definitely going to read more of Butler’s books.

I’m rather sad that she wasn’t able to complete a new Earthseed series, like she planned, before her death.

Three more things she taught me about writing:

• Perfectly acceptable to have the sequel start out as more "and then this happened".
• First act turn is a great place to upend what the characters have built previously, have the outside world come in with the force of a storm.
• Editors and compilers of biographies can have agendas just like other characters, and become more interesting when they reveal them

So frustrating. I had high hopes going in that Elixir might be my next server-side language of choice. It’s built on the Erlang VM, after all, so concurrency should be a breeze. Ditto distributed applications and fault-tolerance. All supposedly wrapped in a more digestible syntax than Erlang provides.

Boy, was I misled.

The syntax seems to be heavily Ruby-influenced, in a bad way. There’s magic methods, black box behavior, and OOP-style features built in everywhere.

The examples in this chapter go deeply into this Ruby-flavored world, and skip entirely over what I thought were the benefits to the language. If Elixir makes writing concurrent, distributed applications easier, I have no idea, because this book doesn’t bother working examples that highlight it.

Instead, the impression I get is that this is a way to write Ruby in Erlang, an attempt to push OOP concepts into the functional programming world, resulting in a hideous language that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole.

I miss Elm.

Day One

• biggest influences: lisp, erlang, ruby
• need to install erlang *and* elixir
• both available via brew
• syntax changing quickly, it's a young language
• if do:
• IO.puts for println
• expressions in the repl always have a return value, even if it's just :ok
• looks like it has symbols, too (but they're called atoms)
• tuples: collections of fixed size
• can use pattern matching to destructure tuples via assignment operator
• doesn't allow mutable state, but can look like it, because compiler will rename vars and shuffle things around for you if you assign something to price (say) multiple times
• weird: "pipes" |> for threading macros
• dots and parens only needed for anonymous functions (which can still be assigned to a variable)
• prints out a warning if you redefine a module, but lets you do it
• pattern matching for multiple functions definition in a single module (will run the version of the function that matches the inputs)
• can define one module's functions in terms of another's
• can use when conditions in function def as guards to regulate under what inputs the function will get run
• scripting via .exs files, can run with iex
• put_in returns an updated copy of the map, it doesn't update the map in place
• elixir's lists are linked lists, not arrays!
• char lists are not strings: dear god
• so: is_list "string" -> false, but is_list 'string' -> true (!)
• wat
• pipe to append to the head
• when destructuring a list, the number of items on each side have to match (unless you use the magic pipe)
• can use _ for matching arbitrary item
• Enum for processing lists (running arbitrary functions on them in different ways, like mapping and reducing, filtering, etc)
• for comprehensions: a lot like python's list comprehensions; takes a generator (basically ways to pull values from a list), an optional filter (filter which values from the list get used), and a function to run on the pulled values
• elixir source is on github

Day Two

• mix is built in to elixir, installing the language installs the build tool (nice)
• basic project template includes a gitignore, a readme, and test files
• source files go in lib, not src
• struct: map with fixed set of fields, that you can add behavior to via functions...sounds like an object to me :/
• iex -S mix to start iex with modules from your project
• will throw compiler errors for unknown keys, which is nice, i guess?
• since built on the erlang vm, but not erlang, we can use macros, which get expanded at compile time (presumably, to erlang code)
• should is...well...kind of a silly macro
• __using__ just to avoid a fully-qualified call seems...gross...and too implicit
• and we've got to define new macros to override compile-time behavior? i...i can't watch
• module attributes -> compile-time variables -> object attributes by another name?
• use, __using__, @before_compile -> magic, magic everywhere, so gross
• state machine's "beautiful syntax" seems more like obscure indirection to me
• can elixir make me hate macros?
• whole thing seems like...a bad example. as if the person writing it is trying to duplicate OOP-style inheritance inside a functional language.
• elixir-pipes example from the endnotes (github project) is much better at showing the motivation and usage of real macros

Day Three

• creator's main language was Ruby...and it shows :/
• spawn returns the process id of the underlying erlang process
• pattern matching applies to what to do with the messages a process receives via its inbox
• can write the code handling the inbox messages *after* the messages are sent (!)
• task -> like future in clojure, can send work off to be done in another process, then later wait for the return value
• use of Erlang's OTP built into Elixir's library
• construct the thing with start_link, but send it messages via GenServer...more indirection
• hmm...claims it's a "fully distributed server", but all i see are functions getting called that return values, no client-server relationship here?
• final example: cast works fine, but call is broken (says process not alive; same message regardless of what command sent in (:rent, :return, etc)
• oddly enough, it works *until* we make the changes to have the supervisor run everything for us behind the scenes ("like magic!")
• endnotes say we learned about protocols, but they were mentioned only once, in day two, as something we should look up on our own :/
• would have been nicer to actually *use* the concurrency features of language, to, idk, maybe use all the cores on your laptop to run a map/reduce job?

A series of confusing, racist, Anti-Semitic stories. None of the characters are admirable. The mysteries are mostly atmosphere followed by “as you know” mansplaining. The only memorable characters are the ones he gives over to racist caricature.

Taught me several things not to do:

• Don't lean on description over plot. A thin mystery is a boring mystery, no matter how you dress it up in thick descriptions.
• Don't hold your characters in contempt. If you don't like writing about them, why would anyone want to read about them?
• Don't assume that insisting two characters are friends is enough for the audience. If they're friends, readers should be able to tell without being told. If no one can tell, then, maybe they're not friends after all?

Oddly compelling. Told any other way, it’d be just one more story about giant robots and the people piloting them. But by telling it through interviews, to make it feel like you’re reading a classified dossier, makes it feel fresh and compelling.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Even old ideas can feel new again when told in a different way.
• Interviews can let you do first-person narration without having to actually narrate. No need for detailed descriptions, etc. Can take a lot of shortcuts and still feel real.
• Don't forget the interviewer! They have their own agenda, and that should come through in their questions and reactions.

Disappointing. Most of the essays are too short to be rewarding, stopping just when they might be getting to something interesting. Several of them repeat the same answers to the same questions (what is the Doctor’s personality?).

However, a few of the essays stand out as offering interesting takes on the Doctor and his world:

• The Doctor is a combination of id (easily bored, cravings for fish fingers and custard) and superego (this world is defended). No discernible ego, though: his companions fill that role for him (!)
• The Doctor and the Cybermen represent opposed views of masculinity. The Cybermen are an emotionally stunted (but all too common) masculinity: closed off, suppressing emotion, stoic and expressionless. The Doctor is a healthier alternative: still paternal, still protective, but emotionally open and compassionate.
• Weeping Angels are terrifying because they turn what should be a Great Mother archetype into the Shadow. From nurturers they become deepest evil; and worse, we cannot run and hide from this evil, we must look at it, must confront it, even though we don't want to.

Eerily prescient. Takes place in a California where water is scarce, most government has been privatized, and the President uses racial politics to push through reforms that weaken protections for workers and the poor.

Felt all too familiar. And she predicted all this over twenty years ago.

I usually don’t like post-apocalyptic books, especially ones that go in for the “slow apocalypse” where everything just collapses over time as people stop taking care of the things that keep civilization going. It’s depressing reading, but Butler’s writing is so compelling, I had to see it through.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Scarcities in society will be reflected in the social order. If food is scarce, being fat is a sign of wealth. If water is scarce, being clean (taking baths) will be seen luxurious. In both cases, being poor and engaging in "rich" behavior will be seen as uppity.
• There's life in the hero's journey yet, if explored from different angles. Here the young protagonist grows up in a small town, yet feels called to greatness, then compelled to become a leader when driven out of their home.
• Adopting a diary structure can let you skip past boring parts of the story will zooming in on the important ones. A well-written diary will do that, and still give you a chance to convey the rhythms of life, since it's the story the person is telling themselves, as they live it.

Insightful, like all of Scott McCloud’s books on comics. Not enough on its own for me to go out and start writing my own comics, but helped me to see connections between storytelling techniques in comics, films, and novels.

Three things I learned about comics and storytelling:

• Comics adds additional choices to the way you tell a story. It's not just the events themselves, but which moments from those events you choose to show, as well as how you frame the "shots" for those moments, and how you render the images within those frames.
• Manga often uses aspect transitions between panels to build a scene. Instead of a single wide establishing shot, will focus in on different "aspects" of a scene (e.g., rain falling from the sky, puddles forming in concrete, raindrops battering steel and glass buildings, etc) forcing the reader to assemble the scene in their own mind.
• Giving your characters different philosophies of life can both enrich their inner lives and make the world you're building feel more real to the reader.

Inspiring. I could not imagine daring to try to write dialog for Greek gods and long-dead philosophers, but she did, and does it brilliantly.

Made me miss my days as a philosophy major, and that’s a good thing.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Long explanations of things are ok, but only after the reader has come to know the characters, and care about them.
• Switching first-person narrators is fine, so long as you keep the number of them down and clearly label each chapter so we know which character is speaking.
• Sense of place can come through not just by food and clothing, but architecture and leisure activities as well.

Easily worthy of the awards it won. Fantastic ideas, presented through conflicts with interesting characters, and writing that describes just enough and no more.

And I almost stopped halfway through.

There’s a point where the protagonist does something so amazingly dumb, that I wanted to put the book down in frustration. But I kept going, and I’m glad I did. Because it only got better from there.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Beware delaying explanations for too long. A character that says "I don't know why I did X" too often, before their inability to explain is outlined to the reader, can lead to frustration.
• Don't have to wait for the character to say "and then I told them my story" to tell that story to the reader. Can layer it in, piece by piece, via flashback chapters.
• Small touches, like bare hands being considered vulgar, when followed-through, can do a lot of work to make a culture feel real.

Fascinating. Examines both what we know about Anne Boleyn (very little), and the stories that have been told about her (very much).

Turns out most of what I thought was accepted history is in fact based on gossip spread by her enemies.

Three things I learned:

• Execution of Anne was the first time a queen had been executed in English history
• Anne spent a good deal of her childhood on the continent, under the tutelage of Marguerite de Navarre (sister of Francis I of France) who ran the most philosophically glittering salon in Europe
• The intelligent, pro-reform Anne of the second season of The Tudors is due mainly to Natalie Dormer, who wanted to portray an Anne closer to the historical one than had been done before

Amazing. I had no idea Wonder Woman was so directly connected to the history of American feminism. Lepore’s account shows how Wonder Woman joins the feminism and suffragist movements of 1910-1920 to the second wave of the 1970s.

Weaves together family histories, feminist politics, and all the messy complications of love without pulling punches or demonizing any of the participants. An incredible book.

Three things I learned:

• Feminists (word arises around 1910) distinguished themselves from 19th century reformers by saying women and men were equal in all ways, that neither sex was superior to the other in any way, and that women therefore deserved equal rights.
• Not only did the Harvard of 1910s not admit women, they weren't even allowed to speak on campus. When the Harvard Men's League for Woman Suffrage invited British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst to speak, they had to book Brattle Hall, in nearby Cambridge, because she was not allowed on campus.
• Margaret Sanger and Ethyl Byrne (sisters), both trained nurses, opened a birth control clinic in New York in 1916. Women lined up for blocks to get in, till the two were arrested: it was illegal to even talk about contraception in New York (!)

Riveting. Perlstein’s book is long, but moves at a fast clip; I stayed up late three nights in a row to finish the last half of the book.

He doesn’t explicitly draw any analogies with our last few elections, but the parallels are there: disillusioned voters; party elites that ignored insurgencies until it was too late to stop them; division of the world into good people and bad people, with any tactics that stopped the bad people allowed.

Not exactly comforting, but it did make me feel better to know that these problems are not new, and they can be overcome.

Three of the many, many things I learned:

• Republican Party of 1976 was much more liberal: party platform that year supported the Equal Rights Amendment, like it had every year since 1940.
• The idea that there are still hundreds of POWs in Vietnam is based on a lie: Nixon inflated the number of POWs from 587 to 1,600 so North Vietnam looked worse. Once the real POWs came home, he didn't reveal the truth.
• New York City almost declared bankruptcy in 1975. When the city asked President Ford's government to bail them out, Ford (and Reagan, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney) not only said no, they were glad to see the great city brought low.

Life changing.

It’s changed the way I watch movies. As I watch I’m now looking for the beats within each scene, paying attention to the rise and fall of emotional charge throughout the film.

It’s altered the way I’m approaching the novel I’m currently writing, helping me to think more clearly about each scene and its purpose in the book.

It’s even got me thinking about going back to outlining everything before starting.

If you’re a writer, I think this book is essential. It’s forever altered the way I approach my writing, and somehow made me more confident in what I’m doing, even as it’s shown me what I’m doing wrong.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Archetypal stories uncover a universal human experience and wrap it in a singular cultural expression. Stereotypical stories do the opposite: dress a singular experience in generalities.
• An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.
• California scenes: two characters that hardly know each other share deep secrets about their past. It happens, but only in California. Nowhere else.

Fascinating. Covers the first Roman millennium, from ~750 BCE to 212 CE, but with the specific goal of highlighting where our common conceptions of ancient Rome are wrong, and how many of our current political and cultural debates go back to the days of the Republic.

This means the chapters aren’t strictly chronological, and sometimes double-back on the same period to illuminate a different side of it. Each is written well, though, and offers interesting facts of its own.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Many of the things that make us squeamish about the Romans (gladiator fights, Caesar's brutality during the wars in Gaul) were criticized at the time by the Romans themselves
• Unlike most ancient empires, Rome was welcoming to immigrants and former slaves (in fact, their system of manumission was the first of its kind)
• Ancient Romans were clean-shaven, going back as far as 300 BCE

Continuing on to the next language in the book: Factor.

Factor is…strange, and often frustrating. Where Lua felt simple and easy, Factor feels simple but hard.

Its concatenative syntax looks clean, just a list of words written out in order, but reading it requires you to keep a mental stack in your head at all times, so you can predict what the code does.

Here’s what I learned:

Day One

• not functions, words
• pull and push onto the stack
• no operator precedence, the math words are applied in order like everything else
• whitespace is significant
• not anonymous functions: quotations
• `if` needs quotations as the true and false branches
• data pushed onto stack can become "out of reach" when more data gets pushed onto it (ex: store a string, and then a number, the number is all you can reach)
• the `.` word becomes critical, then, for seeing the result of operations without pushing new values on the stack
• also have shuffle words for just this purpose (manipulating the stack)
• help documentation crashes; no listing online for how to get word docs in listener (plenty for vocab help, but that doesn't help me)
• factor is really hard to google for

Day Two

• word definitions must list how many values they take from the stack and how many they put back
• names in those definitions are not args, since they are arbitrary (not used in the word code itself)
• named global vars: symbols (have get and set; aka getters and setters)
• standalone code imports NOTHING, have to pull in all needed vocabularies by hand
• really, really hate the factor documentation
• for example, claims strings implement the sequence protocol, but that's not exactly true...can't use "suffix" on a string, for example

Day Three

• not maps, TUPLES
• auto-magically created getters and setters for all
• often just use f for an empty value
• is nice to be able to just write out lists of functions and not have to worry about explicit names for their arguments all over the place
• floats can be an issue in tests without explicit casting (no types for functions, just values from the stack)
• lots of example projects (games, etc) in the extra/ folder of the factor install

Revelatory. Deliberately covers all of Jobs' flaws from his early days at Apple, to show how he learned and grew during his years away to become the kind of leader that could save the company.

Along the way, builds a strong case for the importance of mentors, and for the very capable hands Jobs left the company in when he died.

Three things I learned:

• NeXT once had a deal with IBM to license their operating system to Big Blue, but it fell through because Steve couldn’t handle playing second fiddle
• All of the original five “Apple Renegades” that founded NeXT with Steve quit
• Toy Story spent four years in development before its premiere. Went through at least twelve different versions, including a “last minute” rewrite that delayed its release by a year.

Surprisingly deep and engrossing. Reads like total fluff, but wrestles with real issues: debt, addiction, and substituting daydreams for working toward a goal.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Tension can come from a character's inner dialog, instead of from events. With the right narration, a night of watching tv can become high drama.
• Obstacles don't have to come from outside the main character; it's just as satisfying to watch them overcome situations they've created for themselves.
• Don't always need to hear both sides of a conversation. Sometimes it's more fun to imagine the other side for ourselves.

Realized I haven’t learned any new programming languages in a while, so I picked up a copy of Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks.

Each chapter covers a different language. They’re broken up into ‘Days’, with each day’s exercises digging deeper into the language.

Here’s what I learned about the first language in the book, Lua:

Day One

• table based
• embeddable
• whitespace doesn't matter
• no integers, only floating-point (!)
• comparison operators will not coerce their arguments, so you can't do =42 < '43'
• functions are first class
• has tail-call-optimization (!)
• extra args are ignored
• omitted args just get nil
• variables are global by default (!)
• can use anything as key in table, including functions
• array indexes start at 1 (!)

Day Two

• no multithreading, no threads at all
• coroutines will only ever run on one core, so have to handle blocking and unblocking them manually
• explicit over implicit, i guess?
• since can use functions as values in tables, can build entire OO system from scratch using (self) passed in as first value to those functions
• coroutines can also get you memoization, since yielding means the state of the fn is saved and resumed later
• modules: can choose what gets exported, via another table at the bottom

Day Three

• had to add Homebrew's Lua include directory (/usr/local/Cellar/lua/5.2.4_3/include) into include_directories command in CMakeLists.txt file
• when compiling play.cpp, linker couldn't find lua libs, so had to invoke the command by hand (after reading ld manual) with brew lua lib directory added to its search path via -L
• basically, add this to CMakeFiles/play.dir/link.txt: -L /usr/local/Cellar/lua/5.2.4_3/lib -L /usr/local/Cellar/rtmidi/2.1.1/lib
• adding those -L declarations will ensure make will find the right lib directories when doing its ld invocation (linking)
• also had to go into the Audio Midi Setup utility and set the IAC Driver to device is online in order for any open ports to show up
• AND then needed to be sure was running the Simplesynth application with the input set to the IAC Driver, to be able to hear the notes

Comprehensive. Explains 7 of the biggest ideas underlying the dominant economic model of the world, then demolishes them. One by one, each is shown to be based on false assumptions and a complete lack of evidence.

Ties everything together by showing how policy shaped by these ideas has damaged the world economy.

Three of the many things I learned:

• The modern concept of using defense contracts to spur industrial innovation was invented in the US, in the 1800s.
• For Adam Smith, prosperity came from increased productivity (usually from a better division of labor), not from the Invisible Hand, which was a guide to where to invest, not the engine of growth itself.
• Multiple Acts of Congress (notably the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978) direct the Federal Reserve system to pursue policies of full employment and low inflation. For the past thirty years, the employment mandate has been ignored.

Compelling. Read the last half of this 900+ page monster in a single day.

Still amazes me how King’s writing style is so slight as to be non-existent, but with it he creates these incredibly long, involved, gripping stories. Truly a master of the craft.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Horror stories lean on senses other than sight: smell and taste, in particular. These senses are more intimately connected with our bodies, making the texture of the story more physical.
• A simple task can have tension if the reader is kept guessing as to what might happen, and if the character thinks things could go horribly wrong; if the character has a goal-threatening freak-out, that's even better.
• Horror needs a temptation: an invitation to follow a compulsion the character normally wouldn't, with promises (usually false) given that make it seem ok.

Uneven. The company profiles are interesting, if sometimes sparse on details, and present views into a more democratic form of corporation.

They’re constantly broken up by vague premonitions of disaster, though, a new kind of Malthusian faith that we’re stretching the Earth to its limits.

No evidence is marshaled in support of this belief, and the effect is to weaken the author’s otherwise well-made argument: that the current way of organizing corporations is not the only way, and some of the alternatives are better.

Despite the hand-wavy references to mysticism and quantum physics, I learned:

• The John Lewis Partnership in the UK is its largest department store chain, and is entirely employee-owned, with an elected employees' council that governs the company alongside the Board of Directors
• The Bank of North Dakota is state-owned (!), the only one in the US
• Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work proving that the "tragedy of the commons" is not inevitable, and can be avoided while preserving the commons as community property.

Brilliant. Wallace’s writing is as lean and focused as ever, keeping the action moving and the laughs coming.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Background action can be sped up, to keep focus on foreground.
• It's ok to stand up and cheer for your characters once in a while. It gives readers permission to cheer for them, as well.
• Seeing the consequences of a weird event (transformation, spell effect, etc) before seeing the event itself can make its eventual description less confusing and more interesting.

Eye-opening. Brings two hundred years of Central Asian history to life through a series of vignettes, describing individual lives spent among the cities and caravans of the Silk Road. That technique lets the author pack of a lot of detail into a slim book.

Three of the many things I learned:

• 9th century Buddhist monks would setup stalls in the monastery, offering spells for healing or insight into the future or advice for what to do
• Chinese histories of the time portray surrounding empires as vassal states, when in truth China often paid tribute to those empires to stave off war.
• Even in the eighth century, you could come across ruins and abandoned towns in the Tarim Basin. People had been living there for 2,000 years, and with water so precarious, often had to pick up and move as the climate shifted

Disappointing. Starts out strong, with several good chapters covering how the replicator enables Star Trek’s cashless society, and what could motivate competition and work in such a society.

Starting with the middle of the book, though, the author indulges in multiple digressions, ranging from a chapter covering how Isaac Asimov’s work influenced Star Trek (true, but way off-topic) to one listing all the ways the Ferengi represent 20th-century humanity (also true, but obvious). 

Ends with a chapter claiming that interstellar travel is an economic dead-end, a fantasy, and the only way to get there will be to enable a Star Trek-like society beforehand. Not exactly a perspective to inspire exploration and discovery.

Still, I did learn a few things:

• Currency-less society wasn't part of original Star Trek; the idea was introduced in Star Trek IV, and fleshed out in Star Trek: The Next Generation (and later series, like Deep Space 9)
• President Reagan opened up GPS to the public because the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner in 1983
• In the US, from 1970 to 2012, GDP per capita doubled, while energy use dropped from 2,700 gallons of gasoline (equivalent) to 2,500

Fantastic. Many of the essays are very, very personal – sometimes painfully so – but that only makes the advice they contain more powerful.

Her writing is both clear and funny, making this book both a quick read and a fun one.

Three things I learned:

• Jeremy Renner got his start as a make-up artist (!)
• It's ok to ask for help when something happens in your life (your career, your marriage, etc) that you don't know how to deal with
• Writing fan mail isn't cool, but that's ok: if you like something someone else has created, let them know!

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, vol 2: Still hilarious, easily one of my favorite comics. The characters are fantastic, the art is clear and pops, even the fan letters are great.

Thor, vol 1: Hail the Goddess of Thunder! Great voice for the new Thor. The art is generally good, but sometimes confusing in action sequences. The villain’s plot is just ok; it’s the layers of mystery around Thor (old and new) that made these issues interesting to me.

D4ve: Maybe too juvenile? Overall good, though the plot was generally cliché. Still, funny in parts.

Pretty Deadly, vol 1: Took two reads for me to get into it. The panels are cramped and hard to read for first few issues, but I stuck with it and things clicked into place. Turned into a fantastic story by the end.

Masterful.

Jemisin’s mentioned in several interviews that this was a hard book for her to write, one that she almost deleted and quit on several times. Given the difficulty of what she’s achieved – weaving second-person narration together with multiple storylines that take place entirely in flashback – I can understand. I’m glad she persevered, though, because this is a wonderful book.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Using second person can be useful for handling certain situations: when a character has amnesia, for example, or when they're shifting from one identity to another. Saying 'you' eliminated the need to juggle multiple names, or even care about them.
• Sadly, prejudice and cruelty in characters can make them seem more, not less, human.
• When introducing new terms -- as one often does in sci-fi or fantasy -- it helps to have different characters use them, each in their own way. The repetition with slight variation colors in the definition for readers.

Practically perfect. Preserves a fairy-tale feel while subverting fairy tale tropes; I can easily see why it was nominated for a Hugo this year.

Three things I learned about writing:

• First person with naive narrator learning about the world still a great way to introduce that world to the reader
• Can show evil influence on thoughts by transitioning those thoughts from normal to wicked slowly, taking the reader along with you
• Short descriptions can (and should) be opinionated descriptions

Uneven. The publication stories from the first half of the book are very depressing, and made me think going indie would be the best way to get my novels published. Stories in the second half pick up a bit, but still have the air of persistence in the face of repeated abuse.

Three things I learned:

• One author's book was published 6 years after receiving an initial rejection, but only after the editor that rejected it died (!) and the person going through his office found the manuscript and liked it.
• Many authors at one point took a break from writing -- for 5, 8, 10 years -- and eventually came back to it, then stuck with it long enough to be published.
• Even after you sell your book to an editor, that book might not be published. The editor might get fired, or the publisher could close shop, or they could get bought out, and then your book is "orphaned" until you can get the rights back to it.

Moving. Robinson conveys both the triumphs and the horrors of interstellar colonization, covering hundreds of years in a single book. Almost cried at the end of the penultimate chapter.

Three things I learned about writing:

• The experience of agoraphobia (possibly all phobias) is something the written word is much more suited to portray than film, allowing us to think what the sufferer thinks, feel what they feel, better than other media.
• In a longer work, you can structure chapters as stories of their own, with a cold open, development, slow crisis, resolution, and a reveal
• When narrating long periods of time, zoom out to establish rhythms or patterns, zoom in on unusual or unique happenings (or things that have an impact on the larger patterns)

Intimidating. Martinez mixes bits of Cthulhu Mythos with Norse mythology while maintaining a comedic slant throughout. How does he do it?

Three writing techniques that I think helped him pull it off:

• Use the mundane to ground bizarre events. That could be the relationship between two characters, or the rhythms of work, or the ubiquity of bureaucracy.
• When describing weird things happening, a deadpan tone with a bit of sarcasm can both help the reader sympathize with the characters and help them see the humor in the situation.
• Voice goes a long way in defining a character. If each character has a very distinct voice, then the reader doesn't need as many vocal tags, they don't need as much description of the character, they can build it in their mind from the dialog.

Fantastic. It’s Robinson Crusoe in space, executed so well that what should have been boring and cliche is instead full of tension and humor. I sped through this book, consuming the whole thing in two days.

Looking forward to watching the movie. Oddly enough, since I know Matt Damon plays the title role, I heard his voice for all of Mark’s journal entries. Felt like a good fit.

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can mix regular narrative with journal entries, but it's best to introduce it gradually, and only once the main storytelling mode has been established.
• Relative dates will do just fine. Most of the time, they don't really matter.
• Humor (in the characters or the narration) makes a bleak or depressing situation much more palatable.

More a series of biographies than a proper narrative history. Still well-written and interesting, though.

Holmes' use of language and choice of examples illustrates the Romantic belief that science and poetry were not opposed, but complementary disciplines, both seeking to understand and explain the world around them.

Three things I learned:

• Caroline Herschel, William Herschel's sister, was a great astronomer in her own right, discovering numerous comets and nebulae, as well as compiling the most comprehensive star catalogues of the 19th century.
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written in 1816, can be considered the first science fiction novel, as it took curent theories of biology and chemistry and extrapolated them into the future, then constructed a narrative around the consequences.
• William Herschel was originally an organist in Bath; astronomy was a hobby he indulged in on the side. It just so happened that his homemade telescopes were more powerful than anything any one else had constructed before (!)

Amazing. Desan pulls back the myths about money’s origins, demonstrating in the process how boom and bust cycles are built into our financial system.

Feels weird to call a financial history a page-turner, but this one was compelling reading.

Three of the many things I learned:

• In medieval England, you had to pay (!) for money. Merchants would bring silver bullion to the mint, and the government would convert it to coins, keeping some of the coins generated for themselves as a fee.
• Bank of England notes were used as currency for over a hundred years before they were legal tender (first issued late 17th century, made legal currency only in 1833).
• Metal coins are often used for money, not because of the metal's intrinsic value, but because of how well it fulfills money's needs: the tokens used for money need to be non-perishable, portable, and hard to fake.

Fantastic.

Keyes juggles plot threads involving first contact, corporate espionage, traditionalists versus progressive technologists, power struggles, abusive families and grieving for recently-passed relatives, all without dropping a single one. Grounds everything, even the novel’s villains, in sympathetic characters that you may not agree with, but still don’t want to see harmed.

It’s an incredible feat. I’m awestruck by it, and more than a little jealous.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Sometimes just listening to a character's thoughts as they worry about their present and plan for their future is enough to tell us what we need to know about the world the story's taking place in.
• Spending time with villains, and sympathizing with them, raises the stakes of the climax for everyone.
• Always handy to have a newcomer to the world as an audience surrogate. As they learn and explore the world, so does the reader, without any info-dumping being necessary.

Eye-opening. Reminded me of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance activities, of the importance of the documents Snowden disclosed.

Schneier’s style is easy to read and straightforward, no small feat for a subject that takes in law, cryptography, and communications technology. I plowed through this book in a few days, but I’ll be digesting his points for a good while.

Three of the many things I learned:

• There are companies that sell the ability to send a silent, undetected phone call to a mobile phone. Call won't ring, but will cause it to signal nearest cell tower, giving away its location.
• FBI can (and does) collect personal data from third parties (phone companies, email servers, etc) via National Security Letters, without a warrant.
• NSA audit showed it broke its own rules against spying for personal reasons at least 8 times a day (!) from 2011 to 2012

Inspirational. Completely changed my mind on the tension between narrative and play in video games. Upton provides a perspective that shows narrative is play, just a different kind of it. In fact, play undergirds all the arts, from board games to paintings to novels.

Three of the many things I learned from this book:

• 5,000 year-old boardgames have been discovered inside Egyptian tombs
• Slot machines are programmed to pop up with near misses of jackpots often, so players think the big score is just around the corner
• Chinese narratives often follow a different structure than the Western. Where a Western narrative has some inciting incident leading to rising action and then a climax, Chinese narratives will instead establish a topic and then explore it in great detail before a plot twist throws everything into confusion, which is only resolved at the conclusion.

Southern Cross Vol 1 - Great art. Very creepy. Felt there were some strange jumps or discontinuities in the narrative, but overall it’s well-done.

Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol 1: Disappointing. Dialog is clunky, and none of the characters sound like themselves. Art gets confusing, especially during the action scenes. Final moments of the volume don’t land the emotional punch they want to.

Godzilla in Hell: Fantastic use of graphics over dialog. Only the 1st and last entries have an interesting story. The rest seem fine with rehashing monster battles in elemental locales, rather than exploring what Hell might be like for Godzilla.

Wicked + Divine Vol 3: Slow going in the beginning, then picks up later. Not nearly as moving as Vol 2. Feels like the heart might be missing from this one. Art shifts are possibly appropriate, but strange and off-putting. Best segments deal with the gods' pasts, though not all of them are coherent.

Pretty Deadly #1: Good writing. But the art, to me, is incoherent. Often can’t tell the people out from the backgrounds, and none of the lines seem sharp enough to distinguish objects from each other. Even the panels are cut off in odd ways that made it hard to tell what’s being shown.

Absolutely fantastic from start to finish. Nominated it for a Hugo as soon as I read the last page.

Three things it taught me about writing:

• Keeping chapters short not only gives you an excuse to read "just one more," it also lets you do abrupt transitions between place and mood.
• Characters grumbling to each other (or in their heads) can give you a very compact and fun way to explain aspects of the world that are unfamiliar to the reader.
• By shifting the metaphors used to describe a scene, you can sustain a difference of mood between locations. For instance, in a place of death and white, describing a series of building supports as "arched ribs" echoes the feeling you want to convey.

An odd mix of politics and brewing history. Gives an intro to several breweries, and how they got started, but spends several chapters going over arguments among the brewers on a blow-by-blow basis.

Really wish there had been more space given to individual breweries and going into their history. Even better would have been some chapters with advice for people thinking of starting their own microbrewery. What better way to support the craft beer revolution than to capture and pass on some of the wisdom of the pioneers?

Three things I learned:

• The larger national breweries, like Miller and Anheuser-Busch, use corn and rice additives to extend the shelf life of the beer and make it cheaper.
• Brewing beer at home was technically illegal until 1979 (!), a holdover from Prohibition.
• Stone's Arrogant Bastard Ale (one of my favorites) started out as a homebrew mistake. Before it had a proper name, they referred to it as the "hop bomb."

Lucid, detailed, and engrossing, much like its predecessor, The Plantagenets. Jones has a gift for converting a parade of names and dates into personalities and dramatic clashes.

Unlike the previous book, I could see many more parallels with events in Game of Thrones in this one. There’s a usurper claiming the rightful king is a child of adultery, there are minor houses parleying marriage to the royal house into more influence and power, there’s even a warrior king that becomes fat and indolent in old age.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Entire Tudor dynasty descends from Owen Tudor, a minor noble that Catherine of Valois (princess of France) married after King Henry V died.
• Wars of the Roses were less family feud and more power struggle between multiple great families due to the collapse of kingly power under Henry VI.
• The man who became Richard III was, until Edward IV's early death, one of the most loyal and honorable nobles in the kingdom.

Frustrating. Moving, often brilliant, but feels incomplete in many ways. Magical bits aren’t fully baked, as if he thought it was cool but didn’t want to flesh it out too much (because it doesn’t make sense). Ditto his portrayal of the future, which was scary as hell in the moment but on reflection is just another doomsday scenario from the 1970s.

The overall storyline of following a character from the 1980s to the 2040s feels better, but gets sidelined so often that the final chapters have less emotional impact than they could. There’s also numerous threads that get introduced just for plot’s sake and then dropped, with not even their emotional impact explored, let alone their practical consequences.

All in all, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Using the present tense for the main narrative means that when you do a flashback, you can reach for the past tense as an easy way to distinguish the two.
• Stream of consciousness writing can help make a normally unsympathetic character more likable.
• Stronger to use vocabulary to give a sense of dialect speech, instead of punctuation. It's also easier to read.

Tense, claustrophobic, and dreamlike, a Lovecraftian tale as told by Borges.

Reminded me a bit of Lost with the exotic location, the exploration of a place where strange things happen. Also because it frustrated me like Lost did, introducing mysteries and building tension that it had no intention of resolving.

Three things about writing I learned from it:

• Repeating flashbacks in the middle of a mystery narrative can backfire. If you've built up enough tension in the main story, the flashbacks will be an annoyance, an obstacle for readers to overcome.
• Beware clinical detachment in the narrator. It's ok for a chapter or two, but over the length of a novel it drains any concern the reader might have for them.
• If you can remove half the narrative and your story still makes sense, consider leaving it out.

Absolutely awesome from start to finish. Blends haute-cuisine, horror, and comedy into a cocktail that went down so smooth, I’ve already ordered the sequel. If you’ve ever wished Top Chef were more like The Dresden Files, this is the book for you.

Taught me three things about writing:

• With an omniscient narrator, you can just drop backstory on readers, instead of having flashbacks or waiting for it to come out through dialog. Keep it short, though, so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the story.
• Opening with action is tough. It's a good hook, but without really vivid descriptions, it's going to be hard for the reader to picture what's happening, since they don't yet have a feel for the characters.
• It's easier for readers to accept the fantastic mixing with everyday life if the characters take it seriously as well. They shouldn't be blasé, but having them face the weird head-on is a great way to make it feel more real (as opposed to, say, spending half the book in either denial or ignorance).

A mixed bag of interesting, well-thought out essays mingled with articulate but specious arguments in favor of traditional conservative opinions.

The first half of the book, made of the first 8 essays, is the better half. His arguments in these essays about the limits of law are based on evidence, as when he uses the conflicting conclusions reached by medical studies and the legal system in the Benedictin cases in the 80s and 90s to argue that courts are bad places to decide essentially scientific questions.

In the second half of essays, he begins to twist logic and ignore evidence in order to forcefully insist on the positions he’s adopted.

He claims that the states have changed since the Civil Rights Era, and so there’s no need to worry about devolving power from the federal government to them, ignoring the many groups – women, the LGBT community, non-Christians, immigrants – whose rights the states routinely trample on.

He dismisses Proportional Representation to elect legislators as absurd and unworkable, despite its use in the majority of democratic countries around the world.

In one of the last essays, he goes so far as to say that pushing power down from the federal level to the lowest level possible – county or city – is an alloyed good, a goal to be pursued even if the evidence shows that it makes things worse.

Despite the uneven nature of the essays, though, I did learn a few things:

• In product liability cases, defendants that rely on statistical evidence are more likely to lose in jury trials.
• Making employers check their employees' immigration status is an example of private gatekeeping: when the government delegates part of its regulation powers to private individuals.
• Modern mass tort litigation (in the US) is only a few decades old. It was basically invented in 1969, and continues to be a cobbled together reaction to the fact that a single company can now affect so many lives all at once.

Fantastic. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve been a Chuck Wendig fan ever since Blackbirds (you have read Blackbirds, haven’t you?). Nor am I saying that because his blog is a fountain of NSFW writing inspiration (though it is).

I’m saying that because it’s a Star Wars book that tells a great story, fills in some of the time between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, and manages to feel like a Star Wars movie in novel form. That’s a tough balancing act, and kudos to Wendig for pulling it off.

Here’s what I learned about writing from it:

• Don't be afraid to be opinionated in giving description. It can help keep things brief while still being vivid.
• Part of what makes a hero feel scrappy is not things going right, but things going wrong, all the time. Little blunders and bad luck that they just manage to survive make them feel more real and keep the reader rooting for them.
• You can frame the start of scenes just like framing a shot in a movie. Think of a character's head popping through a hatch, or opening on a lightsaber glowing in the darkness. Can be a visual hook into the rest of the chapter.

Surprising, strange, and very well done. Manages to weave alien contact, game development, and anarchist politics into a story so good and smoothly written that I finished all 300+ pages in just two days.

Can’t believe I didn’t hear about this one until just a few months ago.

Learned several things about writing from this book, including:

• Little touches can go a long way to building both humor and character. For example, the narrator of the book is Jewish, so whenever a character says 'God', it's written out as "G-d"
• Using blog posts as the main form of narrative lets you cut out a lot of scene-setting description, get to the meat of each scene faster.
• Be careful mixing blog posts, real life narrative, and other written forms in one novel. If they all adopt the same casual, conversational tone (as this book does), they start to bleed together, and you lose the advantage of keeping them separate.

Terrible. Just terrible.

Wasn’t able to make it through this one; it was too tough a slog.

Every paragraph was a mess of unsubstantiated claims mixed with the author’s persecution complex and a dash of ignorance. Completely mis-represents everything from the history of rebellion to evolution.

I didn’t learn anything from this book. The author is too convinced of his own infallible intuition to do anything so mundane as deal with facts.

Reads like a nineteenth-century fairy tale. Manages to weave these mythical characters into a bigger story about the immigrant experience in 19th century New York. Wonderfully well-done.

Taught me a few new things about writing:

• You can use multiple perspectives to build tension into the narrative, by giving the reader access to thoughts and feelings that impact the main characters later on.
• It's okay to give opinionated descriptions. In fact, letting your character's perspective color the way they describe the world around them is a great way to make both feel more real.
• Even an absurd premise, if taken seriously enough, can become drama.

Reads more like a series of essays first published in a paper or blog than a book with a single through-line. Probably a relic of its beginnings as a TV series.

Still, the writing was clear and concise, allowing me to learn the following:

• The lightbulb took 40 years to develop. Edison was just the last researcher to work out the kinks. Even his formula -- carbon filament in a vacuum -- was first used in 1841, 38 years before his success.
• Chicago's sewer system was installed by raising the entire city -- buildings and all -- ten feet.
• The artisans that made Venice famous for its glass were Turkish refugees that settled in the city after the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

Fantastic. Not the drawing-room novel I feared it would be, nor the swashbuckling “strong woman” archetype book it could have been. Instead, it’s a wonderful travelogue for a nineteenth century populated by fantastical creatures.

This was a quick read, but I still managed to learn some things about writing:

• It's possible to convey a lot about the historical treatment of women without depicting brutality (I'm looking at you, Game of Thrones). It's enough to hear the narrator rail against the constraints she's placed under, or feel her frustration at having to pretend to not be an intelligent, scientifically curious person.
• You can invoke a time period's writing without indulging in that period's techniques. The book is written with a modern style -- short sentences built into short paragraphs that live in short chapters -- but still feels like it came out of an alternate Victorian period.
• A memoir can lose tension because we know the narrator makes it through. One way to push tension back into the story is to take advantage of the fact that the narrator knows more than the reader, and have them drop in sentences that foreshadow future tragedy or triumph.

Paradigm-shifting. Should have been required reading for my philosophy degree. Beauvoir applies existential analysis to a real problem: the treatment of women through ages of male domination.

Her writing is clear and lucid throughout, whether elaborating the trails of a young girl approaching adulthood or demolishing arguments against legal abortion. This is philosophy at its best, digging past the concrete details of our lives to show the broken abstraction behind it all.

As someone who came into the book thinking men and women should be equal in all things, it’s still completely changed how I view the world. I had no idea of the scope of pressures women feel, starting almost from birth, to conform to an ideal of what it means to be female, an ideal that often prescribes their inferiority. There are so many traps to fall into, traps that keep women from achieving their full potential, many of which I can only see now, after Beauvoir has pointed them out.

It would be impossible for me to boil down everything I’ve learned from the book. But let me pull out three things that struck me:

• When abortion was illegal in France, it still occurred (her estimate is one million abortions a year) but was much more dangerous. She describes one instance where a women waited in bed, bleeding, for four days after a botched abortion, for fear of being sent to prison.
• In patriarchal societies, adolescence is much harder on women than on men. Teenage boys are given more freedom, so they can find their place in the world. Teenage girls have their former freedoms stripped away, so they can prepare for a life spent under their husband's thumb.
• Cultures that will readily grant some rights to unwed women (holding a job, owning their own property, etc) often strip women of those rights when they get married, and saddle them with a slew of new responsibilities. Thus so-called "family values" societies actually incentivize women to skip marriage and having children altogether.

Came out of this one with mixed feelings. Really enjoyed the first third or so of the book, but it turned into a slog about halfway through, when the focus shifted away from the monasteries. Almost broke off reading a couple times after that.

I did learn a few things about writing, though:

• In a work this long, with this many locations, maps become critical. I got lost in the monastery, I got lost during the overland journey, I got lost in every location despite -- or because of? -- the descriptions. Even a rudimentary map would have helped anchor me in the world.
• When introducing a new vocabulary, you need to be doubly-sure the reader understands those terms before they become critical to the plot. There was an entire section (the first voco incident) that had no emotional impact for me because I didn't know what voco was.
• Showing a different side of a cliché plot can be enough to make it interesting again. In the regular telling of this story, the avout would be on the sidelines, popping up only when things needed explaining to the other characters. But here they're the focus, so we see the entire incident from their point of view, making an old plot feel fresh.

Rat Queens Vol 1: Characters are basically college kids with medieval weapons and magic. Wants to both undermine and keep the D&D cliches it’s reacting to. Doesn’t always work.

Wicked + Divine Vol 2: Holy shit, that ending. Much much better than Vol 1.

Deadly Class Vol 1: I don’t want to like this one. It’s violent, and its characters are prone to the world-weary adolescent philosophizing that felt important when I was their age but is boring now. But the art is amazing, and I can’t stop reading.

The Ghost Fleet Vol 1: Starts out with inventive art and an intriguing premise, then becomes just another massive conspiracy plus revenge story.

Saga Vol 2 & 3: Still perfect. Ye gods, how are they doing this?

Blatantly partisan, and frustrating more than informative. Was hoping for a survey history of Latin America, with a view towards US interference. Instead I got an overview of US elites' ideology as applied to Latin America, which was not nearly as illuminating.

The book skips around between years and places constantly, making it hard to form a coherent picture of what was happening at each phase. It also doesn’t quote many primary sources, or do more than mention a speech or paper only to summarize and condemn it.

Despite its many attempts to convince with rhetoric rather than facts, I did manage to learn a few things:

• The US military developed many of its air combat tactics fighting Nicaraguan rebels in the 1920s
• Reagan's administration established a policy office whose job was not just to present their "positive" side of the Contras but also to get citizen's groups to organize campaigns to lobby Congress, which is illegal
• US withdrew from the International Court of Justice because it ordered us to pay reparations to Nicaragua for mining its ports and conducting clandestine operations there

The second of the set of classics I’ve decided to finally go back and read.

As with Heart of Darkness, this book deserves its status. It’s oddly written from a modern perspective, violating rules left and right – telling instead of showing, switching from third to first person narration at the end of the book, having significant action happen off-screen – but is an absolute delight to read. The characters are all distinct and interesting, the dialog often made me laugh out loud, and despite the gulf of two hundred years – and a good deal of class status – made me relate to and care about the happiness of the Bennets.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Verbal tags (e.g., he shouted, she sighed) aren't as necessary as I thought. Austen uses almost none, yet since we know so much about each character's personality, we can infer the tone and intent.
• Description can be dropped for a book set in the same time period as the audience. Austen didn't need to describe a drawing room, or a coach, or any of the characters' clothes. Cutting all that description gave her more room for dialog and inner thoughts, which was more time for us to spend getting to know and care about her characters.
• Don't feel constrained by time. Austen zooms in and out of events as she pleases, summarizing a ball but giving a single conversation blow-by-blow. Skipping over events let her cover a lot of ground in a single novel.

An odd book. The author’s main thesis – that the Celts knew enough about geometry and astronomy to align their cities with the path of the sun – is convincing, once his evidence is laid out. But along the way he falls into claims that sound more like an “aliens built the pyramids” book, such as when he says all Celtic art was based on complex geometric designs.

It’s hard to fault him too much, though; the central idea is inspiring, and his excitement at getting to share it bleeds through.

Just a few of the things I learned from this book:

• The Druids -- and the Celts in general -- were not illiterate, though writing down druidic knowledge was taboo. Most of their writing was done using the Greek alphabet.
• There were several large Celtic migrations in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, that were apparently well-planned (Caesar relates one that was planned two years ahead of time). Many of these ended up in northern Italy; both Bologna and Milan were founded by migrating Gauls.
• The Roman conception of Gaul's geography was terrible. Tacitus thought Ireland was just off the coast of Spain (!). Caesar had to rely completely on local knowledge to navigate the terrain. In contrast, a Gaul from Marseille (Pytheas) circumnavigated Europe in the 320s BCE (Mediterranean to Atlantic Coast to Britain to Baltic to Black Sea back to Mediterranean), taking accurate latitude readings the whole way.

Fantastic, pulpy action. I mean, it’s zombies vs superheroes, how could I not read this?

The writing is sharp and moves along at a good clip, with a cinematic feel. Clines' use of flashbacks lets him bounce back and forth across the zombie apocalypse divide, deepening the characters and the world without slowing the action.

Three things about writing I learned from this one:

• Even in an ensemble book, focus on no more than half a dozen characters. I couldn't tell the non-superheroes apart in this one, and gave up trying to keep track of them all. The heroes were all well-fleshed out, but the regular humans were extras, and who watches a movie for the extras?
• Using flashbacks in short, quick bursts can let you jump in to the interesting part of the story immediately, building and keeping momentum behind the main storyline. Clines could have used the first third of the book to work through each heroes' timeline before the zombie apocalypse happened, but it would have resulted in a much slower book.
• Don't be afraid of writing what you want to write. I'm sure there are plenty of people that would look down on the zombies + superheroes concept, but I'm glad Clines ignored all of them and wrote something this fun and entertaining.

An amazing achievement. Moore’s novel deals head-on with the tragedy and emotional wreckage of losing someone you love, but doesn’t pull its comedic punches either. You end up with a book that’s perfectly willing to poke fun of the lead character one minute, then show the empathy resulting from his experience of tragedy the next.

Oh, and did I mention Moore does it while keeping the writing so smooth its frictionless, juggling multiple points of view, and occasionally just stopping the action to give background on the psychology of the main character?

Forget amazing. It’s intimidating.

Three things I gleaned from this one:

• You can get away with dropping a lot of background info on the reader if it's: a) humorous and entertaining, b) about one of the main characters, c) dropped in after the reader's already emotionally invested in that character
• Placing a tragedy at the heart of a comedy gives it an emotional weight that strengthens both
• You can setup multiple POV later in a novel by swapping out from the main character for short bursts in the beginning, then gradually lengthening the time away from the main POV character as you go. By the time you get to the longer passages later in the book, your readers won't have any problems switching and keeping track of them all.

Fascinating. Shines light on an invisible but vital industry. The author got to travel on a container ship from the UK to Singapore, and she uses each stage of the journey to dive into the history and current existence of merchant sailors, from their food to how they deal with pirates to the convoluted shell companies that own and run the ships.

Extremely well-written, and made my next visit to the Maritime Museum much more interesting, because I understood more of the context in which those ships were operating.

Three of the very many things I learned:

• Merchant sailors are often cheated out of pay by their bosses. In 2010 alone, the International Transport Workers Federation managed to recover $30 million in back pay that was owed to seafarers.
• The Suez Canal is only wide enough for one-way traffic, so they have to stagger the ships going through in convoys each way
• Merchant sailors captured by pirates in the Indian Ocean are held for 250 days (!) on average

Realized recently that I’ve never read many of the classic works of literature: no Dickens, no Hemingway, no Austen. So I picked up a dozen or so and I’m going to work my way through them.

Heart of Darkness is one of those books I’ve heard about for years, especially about its influence on other books and movies (notably Apocalypse Now).

It’s an odd book, short and yet seemingly told with one long breath, filled with racist slurs but treating the plight of africans under colonial rule with sympathy, overflowing with details one minute and skipping ahead days the next.

A few things about writing I learned from it:

• Dropping the use of chapters, and keeping the narrative flow constant, means there's no pauses for the reader to use as an excuse to put the book down.
• A story that reads well aloud can be forgiven a lot. There's large points where Conrad tells instead of showing, or skips over details, or repeats words and phrases, but it never bothered me enough that I stopped reading. The language drew me in; it sounded like the narrator was there whispering in my ear, and how could I be so rude as to stop listening?
• First-person narration is still very powerful, combining direct access to a character's thoughts with the characterization and reading speed you get from dialog.

Revelatory.

I first read this ten years ago, when I was first trying to take my writing seriously. It was inspirational then, and inspirational now, though I’ve discovered different lessons in it this time.

From the autobiographical section, I got a strong sense of the struggle King went through to become the successful writer he is. There were multiple points where he could have stopped, where people wanted him to stop, but he didn’t. Success in writing wasn’t something he was born into, it was built out of hard work over decades that finally paid off and lifted his family out of poverty.

From the section on the writing craft itself, I’ve pulled three new techniques to try:

• Write the story first, and do the research later. The desire to get things right in the first draft is something I struggle with. King emphasizes getting the story out, and then doing the research needed to make it feel true.
• Shoot for a second draft that is 10% shorter than the first. King insists this will push you to not only eliminate pesky adverbs, but also take out anything that is not story.
• Rely on your characters and the situation they're in to tell you the story, not your outline. I've been using this last technique to push my current novel forward. Instead of thinking through each action to its consequences for the outline in my head, I'm just writing out what the characters do and say, letting it evolve on its own. It's helped me overcome the stress and blockage I had two weeks ago, and made writing much more enjoyable.

One of those books I tried several times to read, failed to get into, and finally just plowed through.

I’m glad I did. Stross has created a fantastic updating of the Lovecraftian mythos, blending it with computer science, government bureaucracy, spy thrillers, and comedy (yes, all four).

The result doesn’t have the creepiness or the horror of the source material anymore, but is much more entertaining.

(Incidentally, this is the third novel in the series. Yes, I started with the third one. No, I didn’t feel lost, but I did feel silly for not starting at the beginning.)

Three things I learned about writing:

• You can still get tension from a narrative told as a memoir. When your characters can go insane or become disembodied spirits, terrible things can happen to them but still leave them able to narrate.
• Writing what you know can give you interesting twists on old material. Stross was a programmer for a while, and that kind of thinking is what makes his take on Lovecraft's old gods feel new.
• Even in a first-person story, you can still show non-POV character scenes by cheating a little, and having the narrator imagine how they would have gone.

A rambling, overly-long book. Spends so much time digressing from his core topic – dipping into cognitive theory, the history of Standard Oil, and Greek mythology, among others – that he doesn’t find time (in 700+ pages!) to tie anything together.

The final section is the biggest offender, becoming just a parade of names and quotes with no background, no context, and no focus.

The one point he hammers on constantly is that any attempt to resolve conflicts by playing up the common interests of the parties involved is an “anti-strategy,” as he labels it. This quirky obsession puts him in some odd positions, like when he spends some time talking about the amazing Jane Addams, only to disparage her thinking on conflict by slapping the “anti-strategic” label on it. Many of the women he discusses end up dismissed in a similar fashion, making his attempts to undermine their thinking seem motivated by something other than rational thought.

Even though I felt like putting it down multiple times, I did learn a few things:

• Chimps not only compete politically, they use coalition building within the group, and engage in raids and genocidal warfare outside the group.
• Clausewitz is more famous today, but the most popular writer on military strategy in the 19th century was Jomini.
• Martin Luther King wasn't originally committed to non-violence. Only once some of Gandhi's followers joined his organization -- and after Rosa Parks' successful boycott of buses -- did he commit to nonviolence as a strategy

Ms Marvel (Wilson, Alphona): Well written. Not written for me.

Captain Marvel (DeConnick, Soy): Not as well written. Also not for me.

Superior Spider-Man (Slott, Stegman): Amazing concept and writing. Art confusing and slightly cliche.

She-Hulk (Soule, Pulido): Its cancellation was a tragic loss. Easily my favorite superhero comic.

Five Ghosts (Barbiere, Mooneyham): So well-done, it’s use of women as just damsels in distress sticks out like a splotch of mud on an otherwise perfect painting.

Saga (Vaughn, Staples): Perfect.

Wicked + Divine (Gillen, McKelvie): Awesome concept. Disappointing that they take it to such a mundane place. Emotional heart of the story is strong, though.

Superman: Red Son (Millar, Johnson): A very 50s take on an alternate Superman. Fascinating, especially the Epilogue.

An excellent book, but one I wouldn’t have been able to finish without spoilers. It’s got a very slow start, and even 100 pages in I couldn’t tell most of the characters apart, or match character names to titles to dialogue.

I almost quit the book, but then I reread the essay in Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great that got me to read it in the first place. By giving away the ending, and filling in some of the gaps in a modern readers' knowledge – for example, in 1936, when the book was written, if a college-educated woman got married, she could no longer teach at the university, making the family-or-career choice a stark one – Walton’s essay opened the book up for me, and let me pick up on the multiple ways gender politics is woven throughout.

This is the first time spoilers for a mystery not only didn’t ruin the story, but positively enhanced it for me. If you plan on reading the book, I’d recommend reading Walton’s essay first, if only to equip you with the knowledge of the day that Sayers assumed all her readers had.

I noticed two interesting things about the way the book was written.

First, almost all the action is conveyed through dialogue. There’s a few scenes where Sayers describes what a character does – flicking on a light, for example – but most of the time, Sayers lets her characters talk about the action, or lets us guess that action is taking place by having them describe it. It makes the dialogue feel more real to me, somehow, when we don’t have to interrupt the character’s speech to say something as mundane as “he put on his hat and coat.” Instead, we can let the character’s personality shine through by having them talk about their hat and coat as they put it on, or mumble about how they need to get that elbow patched or complain about missing buttons. However, it doesn’t seem to work well when the reader isn’t familiar with the actions involved; there was a scene in Gaudy Night where the main characters were boating down the Thames, and I couldn’t picture anything that was going on.

Second, the way in which the theme of gender politics gets echoed throughout the book felt masterful to me. It comes up in multiple conversations, it lies at the heart of the mystery, and it’s the core of the problem Harriet Vane (the main and only perspective character) wrestles with throughout: whether to marry Peter Wimsey, or rejoin the scholarly world at Oxford?

I think it even shows up in the structure of the book itself: most of the characters are women, all of the suspects are women, and it’s a woman that leads the investigation for 3/4 of the entire book. It’s a Peter Wimsey Mystery without much Peter Wimsey at all, and the only men that show up most of the novel are adjuncts to the narrative, distractions from the main events, rather than principal players. It’s something that’s all-too-rarely done today, and it must have seemed radical in 1936. I think it was also done deliberately, to make the book not only contain discussions of gender politics and the roles of men and women, but be a shot fired on the side of equality.

Incredibly long, but eye-opening. So much more of the news makes sense to me now, like I’ve been given a set of mental footnotes for each story that mentions anything related to energy.

The book could’ve used some serious editing, though. I found numerous typos, misspellings, repeated phrases, even whole paragraphs that echo each other.

In addition, the book starts out at a good pace, but begins to feel like a slog somewhere around Part 4 (where he discusses renewable energy, then spends Part 5 going into more detail about renewables). Had to push myself to finish this one.

That said, I learned an incredible amount, including:

• In 2011, the US was 78% self sufficient in overall energy: natural gas, oil, coal, nuclear, renewables, etc
• Cap-and-Trade as a solution to carbon pollution was pioneered by the lead permits issued to refineries in the 80s to eliminate lead from gasoline
• In 2009, newly discovered reserves equalled the amount of oil produced over the entire lifetime of the industry

An odd mix of spot-on observations and disturbing cruelty. Bryson nails the incomprehensibility of the Glasgow accent to American ears in one place, then in another compares an overweight family eating dinner to a group of slow-witted bovines.

It’s refreshing to hear a travel writer be frank about the parts of the country they don’t like, and after living in the UK for two decades Bryson seems to have plenty to complain about. He also doesn’t flinch from talking about his own rudeness, relaying scenes where he browbeat a hotel owner, or insulted a woman’s intelligence because her dog got too close to him. Perhaps to a different audience, in a different time (the book was published in 1995) it comes across as bracing honesty, or even funny, but to me it just made him seem like a bit of a jerk.

Still, his writing voice is strong and pleasant, even when he’s not, and I went through the book quickly. I did manage to learn a few things:

• Blackpool's beach isn't a beach. In a stroke of ketchup-is-a-vegetable genius, Thatcher got around EU beach cleanliness regulations by decreeing that Britain's resort beaches weren't beaches at all!
• As recently as the 70s Liverpool was the second busiest port in the UK, and it used to be the 3rd wealthiest town in Britain.
• Glasgow won European City of Culture in 1990

An excellent antidote to the normal narratives of invention and progress.

But Edgerton isn’t a Luddite, or a cynic that doesn’t believe in progress. Instead, he sets out to fill in the stories that normally get glossed over in normal histories: the importance of horsepower to the modern armies of World War II, the communities in West Africa that have grown up specifically to maintain the cars and trucks they inherit from the developed world using local materials, the resurgence in whaling in the 1920s and 1930s driven by demand for whale oil to be used in margarine. It’s fascinating, incredibly readable, and it changed the way I read stories of technical progress and achievement.

Three facts in particular stood out to me:

• India and Taiwan produce more bicycles each year than the entire world did in 1950.
• In 2003, the largest R&D spenders weren't in biotech or the internet; they were car companies: Ford, Daimler Chrysler, Toyota, etc.
• The rickshaw, which I always assumed was an old tech lingering in the modern world, was in fact only invented in 1870, in Japan.

A quick, enjoyable read. Indiana Jones crossed with John Le Carré sprinkled with some Inception-like plotting.

Presents itself as a regular sci-fi novel, but the first half is almost completely filled with flashbacks, a series of nested stories, one inside the other, each level going one step further back into the past. Macleod pulls it off by having the same narrator tell most of it, then uses interrogation transcripts and letters to fill out the rest.

It’s nested all the way down, with the novel’s big ideas woven into the structure of the narrative itself. Ultimately works it way back to the very beginning, the first story, closing the loop in a very tidy (but not too tidy) way.

It’s the best method of infodumping I’ve seen in a long time.

Macleod may have carried the nesting too far. By the time I reached the end of the book (and back to the first level of nested story) I had to re-read the beginning to remind myself of what was going on there, and I’m not sure the details between the two endpoints match up.

Still, it’s a lesson in how to present a lot of backstory (~100 pages worth!) to the reader without it feeling shoved down their throat.

Medieval-level fantasy with goblins and elves, airships and intrigue, and race relations and gender politics and multiple sexual orientations. In a word, awesome.

Vivid and rich and alive in unexpected ways. The plot is rather basic — outsider unexpectedly inherits the throne, has to learn to rule people that look down on him — but the characters are so interesting, so well fleshed-out, that it held me all the way through. I might just read it again.

The big writing lesson for me from this book is exactly that: well-written characters that you want to spend time with will compensate for a lot of other shortcomings. For The Goblin Emperor, those shortcomings would normally compel me to stop reading.

I gave up trying to pronounce many of the fantasy words and names it introduces. The glossary of terms, which I found while desperately searching for some sort of help in keeping terms and titles and characters straight, proved to be worthless. Many of its definitions are either self-referential or refer to other terms which are. There’s also no map, so I had no idea of the relative size or placement of any of the cities and nations mentioned in the book. As some of the intrigue involves trade relations among neighboring realms, this was frustrating.

But I ultimately didn’t care. I cared about the main character from the first chapter, and cared about the others almost as quickly. I skipped over names, I couldn’t keep any of the titles straight, I had no idea where anything was, and I didn’t care. The main challenges of the book were people, and I wanted the main character to succeed with all of them. Everything else faded away.

Wonderfully written re-discovery of the world of 1913 via a tour of its major cities. Manages to give a feel for each without dwelling too long on any one city.

Ends on a haunting note, with the assurances and questions of 1913 obliterated by the war of 1914. 1913 comes to seem an extension of the 19th century, rather than the beginning of the 20th, a different world that had a different future, once. Final chapter quotes a German intellectual returning home after the war to see everything preserved as if 1913 had been frozen in time: the British books, the Persian cigars from French friends, the Russian plays, all transformed, all changed now that the internationalism of 1913 had been dismantled by four years of war.

Three of the many things I learned about the state of the world in 1913:

• The Ottoman Empire was still in the midst of the reforms and changes brought about by the Young Turks and the new parliamentary government they had brought back
• Woodrow Wilson originally ran on a platform of domestic reform, and hoped that his presidency would leave him free from foreign policy crises so he could focus on it.
• Non-European Algerians were french subjects, not citizens. They could become citizens only by renouncing Islam and applying for citizenship

A short book that’s long on emotional arguments. The author seems to believe that merely repeating the phrase “American government is broken” often enough will substitute for producing evidence that over-specification of rules in law has harmed American business or society.

Not that I think our laws are perfect, or aren’t in need of simplification (I’m looking at you, tax code). But I don’t need to read 200 pages of someone repeating that phrase to me, and telling me that other countries do it better. I need specific examples and evidence of how a different approach has saved countries time or money or boosted their GDP or – anything, really, to back up the claim that our government is mired in too much red tape to be effective, and the author’s principles-based laws would solve the problem.

Despite the general lack of facts, I did manage to learn a few things from the book:

• President Clinton had a line-item veto -- granted by Congress via law -- for two years, until the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional.
• Presidents used to be able to hold back money for programs they felt were wasteful or inefficient, till that power was specifically outlawed by Congress.
• Iraqis who worked for the US Army after the invasion were supposed to be given special visas to immigrate to the US (because of the death threats they received), but the Immigration Service delayed their processing over rules so long that some died after waiting more than a year

Very readable history of how the rules of spelling and grammar in English have evolved over time, often despite the efforts of those who attempted to set those rules in stone. Makes a great companion book for Shady Characters.

Three things I learned:

• No one cared about English grammar or spelling until the 18th century. I'd always heard that Shakespeare was a bad speller, or a rebellious speller, but that wasn't it at all: no one in his era cared about spelling very much, so however he wrote the words down, so long as their meaning was clear, was fine.
• At least part of our spelling problems come from using a 23-sound alphabet (the Latin one) to write a 40-phoneme language. The original runic script for writing English had 33 letters, which made it much easier to distinguish the blended th in thing from the separated th of masthead.
• Many of the differences in spelling between American English and British English (e.g., color vs colour) come from Noah Webster, who, in a spate of linguistic patriotism, wanted to give the new country its own English.

A frustrating book, in multiple ways.

Frustrating because it’s good, it’s really good, for about 2/3 of the book. Like her novel Bellweather, Willis really nails the feeling of trying to get something meaningful done while working inside a vast uncaring bureaucracy. By putting me through the minutiae of the main character’s days – including her thoughts on trying to decide what to eat – Willis pulled me into that character’s head, and gave me just as much emotional stake in her research as she had.

Frustrating, too, because the payoff kept getting pushed out. All that daily minutiae means it takes a few hundred pages before anything really happens in the book, and another few hundred pages before the next event, and so on. The last hundred pages of the second third of the book I couldn’t stop reading, I had to find out what was going to happen. This was partly because of how involved in the character’s life I’d become, but also because it took those hundred pages for something to occur.

I can’t decide if that technique is completely unfair to the reader – certainly felt unfair to me at the time – or a master stroke of writing something so addicting it kept me reading long past the point of where I’d have dropped something else.

I did drop it, though. The main storyline basically ends with Part 2. Part 3 is just other characters scrambling to duplicate the main character’s research from Parts 1 & 2, and by that point I’d gotten so frustrated with the pacing that I just skimmed the rest to confirm my suspicions about the plot, and moved on.

So I’m taking this book as a warning for my own writing. I think my novel has grown to the length it has partly because of how much time I’ve spent in my main characters' heads, writing out their hopes and fears and internal debates. Looking at Passage, it’s a very powerful technique, but its use has to be balanced carefully against the action and dialogue that moves the story forward. Too much of it, and my story will become one long crawl upwards, with few drops or twists and turns to provide some release.

Weaves together a history of the architecture, interior design, politics, and sociology of the office, from its rise in the countinghouses of the 19th century to the co-working spaces of the present. Made me want to re-watch Mad Men, this time to appreciate all the historical detail in the architecture and furniture that I missed before.

Out of the many things I learned from this book, three surprised me the most:

• Human Resources as a discipline was invented by Lillian Gilbreth, the wife of the couple Cheaper by the Dozen was based on. It's original name was Personnel Management, and it was based on the efficient workplace theories of Frederick Taylor.
• The Larkin Building in Buffalo, NY, one of the first office buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (in 1904), set all the precedents for Google's offices a hundred years later: rec areas, open floor plans, libraries, and outdoor spaces for employee relaxation.
• The cubicle farm came out of a 1968 design that was intended by its inventor (Robert Propst) to be a more flexible, individualized, office. In seeking to make something more human than the offices of the past, he inadvertently created the inhuman office of the future.

Another novel that makes staring at a computer screen, thinking, seem more exciting than physical combat. But where Egan took me deep inside the protagonists' heads to generate that excitement, Grossman goes one level deeper, using second-person narration from the perspective of video game characters to take me down past the narrator playing the game and into the game itself. It’s a genius trick, and the fact that Grossman manages the transition between first and second person without jilting me out of the story is impressive.

To me, it’s an example of second-person done right. It contrasts with novels – such as Charles Stross' Halting State – that start out in second person, creating immediate dissonance between me and the story. I’ve never been able to get past the first few pages of Stross' novel, but devoured Grossman’s in a few days.

It also made me miss working in video games. Which is strange, considering how much time it spends describing game developers as ill-fed slobs that don’t have lives outside of work. But that feeling of belonging that the narrator talks about, of discovering where he was meant to be after years spent away from gaming, really hit home for me. The narrator’s descriptions of his childhood in the 80s, even though the character is 10 years older than me, still resonated.

That sense of something important happening when he first sat down in front of a computer, of being on the threshold of the future, didn’t happen to me at the time (I was 6, and not very self-aware), but it could have: I used our Commodore-128 to teach myself how to program, and spent many hours typing in machine language instructions from the back of Compute! magazine in the hopes of being able to play a new game. It didn’t feel like something that was only mine, and not for the adults, but it did feel natural, more so than almost anything else I’ve done, and it still does.

Despite everything it does right, You’s ending is unsatisfying for me. The climax of the book happens off-screen, and in the final few pages – that I tore through the rest of the book in desperation to reach – don’t resolve anything. Perhaps that makes the ending more realistic, but the lesson for me is twofold: first, show your climax. The reader’s earned it. Second, tie up most of the plot threads you weave into the novel by the end. Leave some of them, sure, but after so much time invested, the reader’s going to want to have some of the tension you’ve built up released. Ideally, showing your climax also releases the tension and resolves multiple conflicts – internal or external – at the same time.

A remarkable book. Covers not just the development of Keynes' and Hayek’s positions, but also how they developed in opposition to each other, then moves on to how their followers (both politicians and economists) have continued the argument over the past 70 years.

I’m not sure how balanced the book is. After reading it, my opinion of Keynes is much higher than it was before, and my opinion of Hayek is lower.

Hayek’s economic ideas come across as an obscure version of classical economics, neither very original or very influential. Hayek’s politics, the idea that any government intervention in the economy inevitably leads to fascism, has the whole of recorded history against it, with the last 70 years as a comprehensive refutation.

Keynes, on the other hand, invented the Bretton Woods system, and laid the foundation for the IMF and World Bank. His criticisms of the Paris Treaty that ended World War I led to the US policy of rebuilding Germany and Japan after World War II instead of trying to hold them down. Despite politician’s rhetoric, his economic and political ideas are the dominant ones in Western society, and have been since his death.

However, this interpretation of mine could be a result of my natural tendency toward Keynesian thinking, and not a result of any bias in the book. After all, followers of classical economics have been looking at exactly the same world as the Keynesians and coming to different conclusions for decades; perhaps from a Hayekian perspective this book proves just how prophetic he was?

In any case, it did show me the massive gaps in my understanding of the history of both men:

• Keynes pioneered the now-conservative idea that decreasing taxes is the same as spending money to stimulate the economy. In the US, it was first proposed as policy by Kennedy in 1962 to overcome a mini-recession, and the economic data support Keynes.
• Keynes invented the discipline of macroeconomics, which is partly to blame for why he and Hayek disagreed so violently: they were really working in different disciplines.
• Milton Friedman, Hayek's biggest supporter, actually first adopted Keynesian economics, only rejecting them after his study of the causes of the Great Depression in the US. It was Hayek's politics, not his economics, that Friedman and the conservative establishment of the UK and US adopted.

Very hard to characterize or sum up in any way. She’s stuffed it with essays, stories from her life growing up and working in comedy, commentary on social issues, real photos and fake letters.

It’s top to bottom fantastic, but let me try to pull out three of my favorite parts:

• Her chapter on getting older and the superpowers you acquire made me look forward to turning 40.
• Her detailing of the lifetime of work it took to get to where she is - that it takes for anyone to "make it" in show business - made me want to be even more supportive to the friends I have that are trying to build that body of work as sketch comedians or screenplay writers.
• Her "heart" and "brain" apology letters made me hear exactly how insincere I sound when I try to apologize to, but still win an argument with, my wife. I need to give up thoughts of winning and be vulnerable enough to be truly sorry.

Interesting little book. I finished it in just over an hour, swallowing the thing whole. Part of that was the breezy style, part of it was how similar most of Kleon’s advice is to what I’ve read elsewhere.

Three things that were new to me:

• Most great artists - and the majority of good ones - are embedded in a scene, a group of other artists that create, share, and respond to each other's ideas. Previously this meant moving to a city and getting involved in its local culture, but today it can mean joining any group of like-minded creators online.
• The way to ensure you don't overshare is to always be pointing to the work of others and celebrating it.
• Instead of taking breaks between projects, go from one straight into another, constantly moving from work to work. To keep from burning out, take sabbaticals every decade or so, long breaks where you walk away from doing finished projects to daydream and doodle. But during your working periods, don't pause for breath: finish one project, and start another immediately after.

I’ve refrained from reviewing fiction on the blog for two reasons: first, I don’t want to have to issue spoiler alerts for the books I want to talk about, and second out of a (possibly misplaced) sense of professional curtesy; as a writer who wants to be published professionally, I don’t want to be seen as being overly critical of those whose ranks I wish to join.

I’m breaking my self-imposed rule now because I realized there’s a way to talk about the fiction I read without indulging in spoilers or going too negative. Instead of discussing the overall quality of the book, like a normal reviewer, I’m going to talk about what I’ve learned from it about the art of writing. Like studying Frank Lloyd Wright buildings for architects, or replicating how Van Gogh made his own colors for painters, I think each book, each short story I read can teach me about the writing craft.

Take Permutation City, a book I finished recently. It’s an older science fiction work - published in 1994 - recommended by Jo Walton in her What Makes This Book So Great? compendium of fantasy and sci-fi reviews. What did it teach me?

It supports the idea that the real strength of the novel (as opposed to film or tv) is the ability to completely describe a character’s thoughts and dreams in addition to their actions. Novels can take you deep inside someone else’s head, something that tv and film can’t really do. It’s something Egan proves a master at, using it to make what on film would be just a character staring at some shapes moving on a screen into some of the most compelling parts of the story. In contrast, the more traditional “action” parts of the story aren’t as interesting or exciting.

It offers a rebuttal to my (recent) idea that often the details of something don’t matter, that character and plot can carry you through even when you’ve got the science (or the law, or the traditions) wrong. I’ve been using this idea to explain why I still enjoy shows that have dodgy physics or loose legal systems (Arrow, Forever).

But Permutation City has a huge crack running through the middle of the narrative, a place where it gets the details so wrong that the only way the plot can proceed is if you take a leap of faith along with the author, disregarding a lot of what we know about the physical world and how computers work. It’s a leap of faith I couldn’t make, and it divides the book into a well-detailed, well-thought-through portrait of the mid-21st century and a second half that, for me, might as well have been a discussion of angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Perhaps if the novel had built that leap of faith in from the beginning, I might not have felt the fracture? In any case, I’m taking it as a warning, a sign that sometimes getting the details wrong (or perhaps poor timing of certain details?) robs well-drawn characters and intricate plots of their power.

Repetitive in places and oddly self-promoting. Farrell adopts the grade-school method of writing: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. After reading other financial advice books (Personal Finance for Dummies, Pound Foolish) that use a more modern and adult style, his was frustrating and a little off-putting.

That said, the advice itself is interesting and logical. Three things I learned:

• 401K contributions are taken out pre-tax, and are tax free until you take them out. This means contributing to your 401K is an easy way to both save for retirement and lower your tax bill (since those contributions don't count toward your income for the year).
• Social Security is solvent now and will probably remain so, though benefit payouts might be reduced over time to keep it that way. Still, you can include it in your retirement planning, lowering the target amount you'll need to save.
• Splitting your retirement savings between stocks and bonds protects you from some of the down swings the stock market will experience over the years you'll be saving for retirement, allowing you to confidently adopt a long-term perspective for your investments.

Picked it up because of Schneier’s awesome columns in Wired and his generally great blog posts. Glad I did, though it wasn’t what I expected.

It turns out to be less of a book with new information and more of one that organizes the things we already know about trust from game theory, anthropology, and neuroscience. It’s well written, and focused on building a framework with which to understand problems of rule making and rule breaking in modern society.

Three connections I hadn’t made before:

• Corporations cannot be punished like individuals, which makes it harder to force them into compliance, and increases their tendency to defect. The harshest punishment any corporation undergoes is fines, converting a decision that should be affected by moral considerations into a simple question of dollars and cents (and turns the fine into just one more cost of doing business).
• One potential downside to increasing diversity in a neighborhood: as the number of different standards of what's fair and what's polite multiplies, your chances of unknowingly offending someone with your "normal" behavior increases; thus trust in general in the neighborhod declines.
• Facebook is becoming an institution, setting norms for social behavior, and yet it is a for-profit company, with conflicting interests between its profit motive and society as a whole.

Oddly inspiring. Martin doesn’t seem to take any joy in this retelling, which only covers his years as a stand-up comic. He seems to look back on his early performing days not with nostalgia, but with a wonder that he persisted so long in doing such poor material.

But it’s that story of persistence that makes the book inspiring, of the decades of work behind his overnight success.

Three things I learned about Martin:

• He worked at performing for 18 years (!) before becoming a success
• Had a long stint writing for TV. While many people would consider that a career, and good enough, for Martin it was just a way to pay the bills while he worked on his act.
• He grew up in Orange County, California, and got his early stage experience at theme parks: Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm

Light and breezy, but not the puff book I cynically thought this would be. Instead, Cary’s joy (and the joy of almost everyone else involved in making the film) and fond memories shine through. Made me want to watch the Princess Bride all over again (not that I need much of an excuse).

Three things that stood out:

• Cary got the gig partially on his ability to do impressions. He showed this off at the signing my wife and I went to, doing impressions of Rob Reiner, Miracle Max, and André the Giant.
• Mandy Patinkin and Cary trained with fencing experts for months to be able to perform their sword fight without resorting to stunt doubles.
• Wallace Shawn (the actor playing Vizzini) thought he was going to be fired at any moment and replaced with Danny DeVito

Simply fantastic. Houston writes incredibly well and has done his research, teasing out the true history of a dozen different typographical marks out of a mess of false leads and myths.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Punctuation was invented by the Greeks as guide for how a text should be read aloud. Before that, they wrote everything as a single stream of capital letters.
• The asterisk and dagger marks got their start as part of literary criticism: either marking out questionable text or calling attention to something interesting in it
• The original typewriter keyboard did not have an exclamation point. You had to construct it manually using a period and an apostrophe.

Incredibly well-written. Covers nearly 600 years of European (and world) history without oversimplifying or tipping over into names-and-dates territory. Digs deep into the conflicts of those years to show how the Holy Roman Empire, and then Germany, was at the heart of most of them.

This was a serious corrective for me, since when I was growing up Germany meant Nazis and Nazis were the Last Great Bad Guys (the Soviets were more sympathetic when I was little) so Germany was the country we didn’t talk about much in history class, save to point out all the ways in which Germany had effed things up for the rest of the world.

But leaving Germany out meant a lot of European history and strategy didn’t make sense to me. Why would Britain want to defend Belgian neutrality in WWI? Why did Germany talk so much about encirclement? Why did anyone care that Charles V held both the crowns of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire?

Simms' book finally filled those gaps in my understanding, and also taught me:

• During World War I, sauerkraut was renamed "victory cabbage" in the U.S.
• Spain, as the last fascist power left in Europe at the end of WWII, was singled out as being banned from the UN until it had become a democracy, and was hated by both the US and the Soviets.
• The experiences of Germany and Poland with weak central governments were used as examples in the Federalist Papers for why the new United States needed a stronger central government.

An uneven but interesting short book about the history of ninjas. I like that he spends time dispelling most of the myths about ninjas and tries to get back to their real historical role in Japanese warfare. Towards the end, though, he stretches to try to attach the ninja ethos to the Japanese Intelligence officers of World War II, and ends up sounding like an apologist for actions that all too recently propped up a racist, genocidal regime.

Still, I did learn a few things:

• Ninjas were basically mercenaries, and they could be samurai or peasants.
• Ninjas were mostly used as scouts or spies (to find/count enemy troops, discover the weaknesses in a castle, etc) and occasionally hired as a strike force to sneak into a castle and raise hell (or the gate).
• When ninjas did fight regular troops, it was usually as locals defending their homes from marauding armies.

An amazingly good book on writing, being a writer, and what it means to write fantasy in general (and children’s fantasy, in particular). Her voice is so strong, it sounds like she’s sitting next to you on the train, telling you these stories about her life and her writing process to while away the time.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Care about all your characters, even the very minor ones with hardly any speaking role at all
• It's ok to start the journey without knowing where you're going, so long as you see it through
• Don't let yourself be boxed in by others expectations. Write the best story you can, while you can, that you yourself enjoy.

Another controversial book that turns out to be full of bad reasoning.

The central thesis is that certain minority groups do well financially in America, and the reason they do is because of a trio of cultural attitudes: a feeling of group superiority, coupled with a sense of individual insecurity, mixed with strict impulse control. These traits help them succeed because America’s dominant culture is one of instant gratification and personal self-esteem.

The implication is that these minority groups are hard-working go-getters, while the rest of us are lazy coke-heads waiting for our next welfare check.

Unfortunately, the authors have no evidence for either the Triple Package in their minority cultures, or for the dominant lazy culture they insist the rest of America has. They do have hard numbers that certain minority groups, after immigrating to the US, have higher median incomes than the rest of the country. But that’s it. All their cultural evidence is anecdotal, the sole exception being a survey that showed Asian Americans tend to spend more time studying than others.

They use this anecdotal evidence to sweep away the numerous studies that show a slowdown in American social mobility (the rich are staying rich while the poor are having a harder time climbing up into the middle class) and a decline in the share of national income going to lower income tiers (the vanishing of the middle class). There are children of poor immigrants that end up running multi-national corporations, they say, so surely we could all do the same if we just adopted the Triple Package? That these children are the exception, and not the rule, doesn’t seem to bother them.

Perhaps, if pressed, the authors would blame the recent hardening of class boundaries on the success of the self-esteem movement. After all, they lay numerous other social ills at its feet, including the Great Recession of 2008, the increase of US public debt, and the decline of American “soft power” in the early 21st century. Never mind that all of the above were created by leaders raised long before the self-esteem movement took hold, nor that these leaders often came from the very minority groups the authors want to praise.

Refreshingly, the authors acknowledge that the traits they want the rest of America to adopt often lead to psychological problems. A sense that your ethnic group is superior is the basis for every form of racism. A sense that you can never be good enough drains all the happiness you might feel from your accomplishments. And extreme impulse control can drive you to never relax, never take time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

After acknowledging these problems, though, the authors sweep them under the rug. To them, such psychological problems are simply the price of success. If you’re not willing to pay it, it’s because you don’t want to be successful enough.

The idea that you can be successful without these traits never occurs to the authors.

I was raised to value education and hard work, too, but without the punishing complexes the authors praise. That seems to be the real lesson of their research: that investing in education, coupled with ambition (to set lofty long-term goals) and patience (the ability to perservere in the achievement of those goals) can still be a formula for success in America. Unfortunately, that would have made the book much less controversial, so they had to focus on the cultural elements they see producing those traits.

In truth, there’s no need for the psychological complexes the authors think so highly of. Confidence can naturally come from accomplishment, and parents that are consistent with rewards and punishments can help instill discipline in their children. With those two traits, and a lot of luck, you can push through the obstacles between yourself and your goals. No chip on the shoulder, no crippling sense of insecurity required.

I did learn one thing, though: they recently did a follow-up study to the famous Marshmallow Test that showed that children who were primed to distrust the adult were less likely to wait for the second marshmallow.

A work of amazingly bad scholarship and poor critical thinking. Morris spends the better part of 400 pages trying to prove that war has been the primary engine of human advancement, and that war - not democracy, not the rule of law, not the cooperative instinct - has made us safer.

A weaker version of his thesis - that some wars make the world safer, or that war has acted as a natural selection pressure on human states, weeding out those that fail to ensure the greatest prosperity for their citizens - would be both interesting and justifiable. At every turn, though, Morris refuses to take a reasonable position, pushing his thesis far past the point at which it can be defended.

It doesn’t help that each chapter is full of historical inaccuracies. Sometimes he’s recasting historical events to suit his thesis, such as when he insists the Roman Empire “split in two” in 220, when in fact only the administration of the Empire was divided; the Empire itself was considered whole for hundreds of years after. Other times he skips over inconvenient facts, like when he insists that the years after 1100 were “centuries of decline” for Europe, despite the evidence that over that period wages rose, new inventions entered use (e.g. the water mill) and life for the common people (the majority) got better. Or when he waxes poetic about “prosperous plantations” founded by the Portuguese on Madeira and the Azores, leaving out the numerous slaves imported to work on those plantations.

Sometimes Morris makes up his own facts. In several places he compares rates of violent death across time periods, but these rates are mostly (his own) guesswork. And what a surprise, his guesses support his thesis that rates of violent death have declined as states have gotten larger.

At one point he actually admits that his numbers might be wrong, but then claims that it’s for future scholars to come up with better numbers and refute him, which is one of the most brazen admissions of copping-out I’ve ever read. Why add to the body of careful scholarship, when you can publish a controversial thesis without evidence to back it up?

Other places where Morris makes inexcusable mistakes:

• His take on the Muslim caliphates founded in the seventh century: "Hardly anybody took notice of them."
• On American Revolutionary soldiers, who nearly lost the War of Independence multiple times: "[they] ran rings around the rigid, ponderous professionals"
• He characterizes Communist China as a Soviet client prior to 1972, and that Nixon "broke them away" from the Russians. In reality, the Chinese Communists and Soviets had always been at loggerheads, and formally denounced each other in 1961. China invited Nixon to visit as part of its gradual opening up to world trade, a fact well documented in any modern book on Chinese history.

For example, he actually does have evidence that rates of violent death in private disputes dropped under the Roman Empire. His interpretation is that only fear of punishment by the Roman government kept people in line, so the Roman wars of conquest were justified. He ignores the fact that every society has means of adjudicating conflicts, some more violent than others, and that perhaps having access to something like the Roman courts was all that conquered peoples needed to put down their arms.

Also, Morris doesn’t address the possibility that the rate of violence stayed constant, but shifted to state violence instead of private violence. I might lose my hand because I was found guilty of theft by a magistrate, instead of having it cut off by a rival, but the hand is still gone.

Later he wants to distinguish between productive and unproductive wars. Productive wars are wars that create larger states - bigger is always better for Morris - and unproductive wars break up large empires into smaller ones. This leads him into contradictions when discussing the many wars fought by steppe nomads against settled peoples: he calls them unproductive wars because they broke up the empires formed in Europe and along the Mediterranean, even though they created some of the largest empires in the world (the Ottoman and Mongol both come to mind) that also stimulated trade by eliminating brigandage along the Silk Road, connecting China to the Mediterranean via overland routes.

The cycle of boom and bust (productive war followed by unproductive war followed by productive war) he wants us to believe in is easily interpreted as being proof that war is not productive, that expansion of government by violent means is intolerable and unsustainable. Trade expansion and good government become possible at the exact moment that rulers abandon war as the primary means of seeking prosperity and power.

I won’t even address the conclusion of his book, where he claims that the US needs to keep spending large sums on its military and playing global cop until the Singularity arrives and makes war obsolete. It’s such a sudden lurch off the rails of his narrative and over the cliffs of delusion that I have to believe it was inserted by the editor as a prank.

I did learn some things, though:

• If you're a British professor, you can get poorly-argued historically inaccurate books published, so long as they're also controversial
• There's a segment of the US and British elites that still want to believe colonialism was justified
• It's possible to write modern books on history without catching up on recent scholarship

Couldn’t finish it. The first two chapters can be summarized as: “We have no idea what it was like for peasants in Roman and early medieval times, but I bet it was terrible, because every cultural achievement was built on their sweaty, overworked backs. Now here’s a bunch of quickly summarized history to wash that down.”

What did I learn? Nothing, really. There are better books out there on everything he tackles here, from the waxing and waning of Imperial Rome (see Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire) to life in Spain during the Reconquista (see Kage Baker’s In the Garden of Iden).

Short, direct and to the point. Yglesias makes a good case that housing prices in the US are a serious problem, and one we can solve. The driving cause is not techies taking over, or greedy landlords driving up rents. Instead, the roots of the problem lie in regulations that restrict housing density.

3 Things I Learned:

1. The meme comes from a real debate held in the run-up to the New York governor's election of 2010.
2. Tall buildings are actually illegal, not just hard to approve, in most suburban areas.
3. Parking regulations have a large impact on the feasability of a project. For example, if the law requires one parking space per unit, and the bedrock prevents building more than two stories for underground parking, you've got a hard limit to high up you can build. Ironically, with denser development placed closer to jobs, we wouldn't need as many cars. Requiring the parking spaces actually makes congestion worse, in addition to driving up housing prices.

Surprisingly good. Jones covers almost 300 years of history at a pace that feels perfect: not so fast that you miss out on interesting details, not so slow that you ever want to stop reading. Each chapter zooms in on just a few years, keeping them short and easily digestible but still giving him space to tell a dramatic story.

Three things I learned:

1. I always thought England went thousands of years without an invasion by a foreign power: from 1066 to the present. Turns out France invaded during the chaos at the end of the reign of King John (who you may remember as the villain in most Robin Hood movies).
2. In many ways, the early Plantagenet kings were really French lords that happened to have the throne of England. They spent most of their time in France, since that's where most of their wealth and power came from. John was the first king to spend the majority of his time in England, and the local barons got so sick of him they forced him to sign the Magna Carta.
3. I thought the Glorious Revolution was the first time parliament deposed and chose a king, but really it goes back into the Plantagenet era: both Edward II and Richard II were deposed via parliament - Edward in favor of his son, Edward III, and Richard in favor of Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV.

Highly recommended. Takes the interesting approach of covering China’s rise over the last 200 years by profiling a selection of leaders (intellectual and political) from each period. It’s missing a map of China, so you may want to read with Google Maps handy so you can get a sense of where things in the book are happening. Also seems slanted toward the position that China’s path to wealth and power has been a successful one, instead of a crooked road paved with the bodies of the dead (see Tombstone).

Three things I learned:

1. Sun Yat-Sen was not the “father of democracy” I thought he was. Rather, he was one more reformer vying for power in the period at the end of the Qing dynasty, and not a very successful one, either.

2. The feeling of humiliation for Chinese goes back to the nineteenth century. It’s not an invention of the communist party; the Chinese intellectuals of the time saw their treatment at the hands of the Western powers as humiliation, not simple defeat.

3. The Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 was done at the orders of Deng Xiaoping, the same leader that started China on the path to a more market-based economic system.

Worth the read, but takes a while to get going. The meat of his argument is in Part II, and you can basically stop reading there without missing much.

He often seems more interested in creating a mood, a shift in perspective, rather than advancing an argument or telling a story.

3 things I learned:

• Both the Vandal conquest of Africa and the Gothic conquest of Italy were less "invasions" than power grabs by elites that had grown up on the borders of the Roman Empire and wanted to be a part of it. Those elites were elites, in part, because of intermarriage with the imperial family and having served as imperial troops in previous wars.
• Justinian, the emperor who in most histories is a valiant hero trying to reclaim Roman glory, can be seen as the man who destroyed the new stability the empire was settling into, pushing it into dissolution.
• The popularity of the monophysite variant of Christianity in the Eastern Roman lands (Egypt and Syria), and its suppression during the reign of Justinian, probably paved the way for the rapid adoption of Islam in the seventh century.

Well worth the 400 pages. Graeber humanizes the history of debt, bringing anthropological insight to our understanding of the history of money.

Unfortunately, his multiple objectives - to overturn the common story of the origins of money, to critique capitalism as a system, and to give a comprehensive history of debt, among others - pull the book in different directions. They’re all interesting, but prevent the book from gelling into a coherent whole.

Three things I learned:

1. The interest for credit cards in the US used to be capped at 7% (!).
2. There were large periods of human history where things were bought on personal credit, not with coins. Only strangers used currency.
3. We can distinguish between capitalism, or the belief that money should always make money (interest), and free markets, or the belief that people should be free to start and run their own businesses. Being in favor of free-markets does not automatically make you a capitalist.

Picked it up because of the movie’s release and as my next John le Carré novel.

Three observations on its style:

1. Very slow start. I almost put it down several times before I pushed past the halfway mark, when things finally got moving.
2. This is my third John Le Carre novel, and I realized I always spend the majority of the book confused. Can't yet tell if that's deliberate on the author's part - wanting to make the reader feel the confusion and stress of spy work - or if that's just me not understanding the late-60s early-70s British dialogue. Could be both. That said, I tore through the last half of the book, wanting to find out the answers to all the questions setup in the beginning. So while the technique is frustrating, it's also successful.
3. Almost everything is done through dialogue. Even character actions are conveyed through the dialogue that accompanies them. Leads to very realistic dialogue for the characters, but also made me feel sort of detached from everything that was happening. Again, could have been a deliberate way of conveying the distance these characters are supposed to keep from the world.

Don’t be put off by this book’s size. Caro converts the story of Johnson’s run for the Democratic nomination in 1960, time in the Vice-Presidency, and ascension to the Presidency into a thrilling read.

Three things I learned:

1. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, not Kennedy. I always thought those were JFK triumphs; instead, they were JFK dreams that went nowhere until Johnson became President and pushed them through Congress.
2. Johnson came into Congress as a New Dealer (!). I had no idea he served over two decades in Congress before becoming Vice-President
3. Robert Kennedy and Johnson hated each other. I didn't know there was a feud between the Kennedys and Johnson, let alone that it was mostly focused between these two, or how deep their hatred of each other ran.