Cold

It’s been a cold year so far, in more ways than one.

First there’s the obvious.  It’s cold here in Baja Canada.  Bitterly cold.  Ditch-digger weather.  Sad brass monkeys all around.  We’ve been below 0F at some point of pretty much every day since we got back from Tennessee (and a few before that, apparently).  Last night it got down to -13F, which is about -25C so we’re cold in both metric and imperial units.  It’s cold.

I realize that my Canadian friends are even as I post this frantically typing out messages that start out with “You think that’s cold?  We picnic in that weather!” but you know, I’ll let you guys have that one.  And the health care.  And the sensible regulations on firearms.  And the government that isn’t clinically insane and a threat to the survival of the human species.  So yeah, Canada.  Good on ya.

Meanwhile here in MURCA! it’s colder than Mars.  It snowed in Florida.  Texas was at freezing in one corner and well over 100F in another on the same day.  And most of the Northeast was bombed by a snowstorm, if I heard that right, one that apparently involved putting large portions of Massachusetts underwater.

Good thing the climate isn’t shifting, because otherwise?  I’d be worried.

What?

It’s also been a cold year on the viral front.  We all made it back from Tennessee in reasonably good health, but almost as soon as we landed back home everything fell apart.  We’ve all had the same maddening cold.  It’s not one of those colds that wipes you out and leaves devastation in its wake so you can curl up in a wodge of blankets with only your nose sticking out and whine into your steaming bowl of chicken soup for a few miserable days until it goes away.  No, this cold just makes you feel kind of bad – a sore throat, a few aches, a cough that won’t quite go away, some stuffiness.  You feel a bit better one day, a bit worse the next day, but never quite laid low and never really good, and it never goes away.  It's really nothing you can’t fight your way through the workday with if you have to.  Just enough to remind you that once upon a time you felt good but now you don't, sort of the way you feel when you remember that we used to have a government run by law-abiding officials who weren’t actively subverting the social contract.

Not all that long ago, too.

The cold also makes food taste off, the way colds will.  This is a particular problem for me right now because I recently received a most generous gift of a bottle of whiskey.  It is a fine bottle of whiskey, quite possibly the finest I have ever owned, and I am truly grateful to have it.  I am very much looking forward to enjoying it, an experience that having the bitter cold winter outside my door could only enhance.

You know those commercials featuring those Manly 4-Wheel Drive Land Yachts Of Manly Manliness bursting through snowbanks and scattering wildlife?  I always feel bad for the people who own those things, storm-busting their way to a productive day at work while the rest of us stay home and sip whiskey while reading a good book in a comfortable chair.  To each their own, I suppose.

But there is the maddening cold that we all have, the cold that makes everything taste like something you should have put more time into preserving when you made it last week.  I absolutely refuse to open this bottle of whiskey until I can actually taste things right again, and at this rate that might be June.

In the meantime, we cough and wheeze at each other, wrapped in our blankets and waiting for the ability to breathe normally again.

Yeah, it's cold.

Books Read in 2017, Part 4

And so 2017’s books come to an end.

On to the next pile!

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Under a Lucky Star: A Lifetime of Adventure (Roy Chapman Andrews)

I have no idea how Roy Chapman Andrews managed to hear himself think over the clanking din of his enormous brass balls.  There’s a reason they built Indiana Jones to look like this guy.  He was born in Beloit, Wisconsin in 1884 to a middling sort of family and eventually became an indifferent student at Beloit College, but after graduation he decided to make something of himself.  So he went to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and essentially browbeat them into giving him a job sweeping the floors, and within a decade he was one of their top explorers.  He went whaling and brought back information that had never before been seen by scientists.  He spent years of his life traveling to Japan, China, and Mongolia, in places where he was often the first white person to set foot.  He lived in Peking in the 1920s, explored the Gobi Desert for years on end, discovering vast numbers of dinosaur bones in the process, and made the friendship of a Japanese madam in a whorehouse in Yokohama.  He dined with John D. Rockefeller and JP Morgan – he met an enormous number of famous and powerful people, for early 20th-century values of famous and powerful, and he was not shy about name-dropping when he wrote this book – and eventually became the director of the Museum itself, which confined him to New York City, where he lived in a small house built onto the roof of a hotel, a house that he remade into something akin to his house in Peking.  He toured the country giving lectures, had his own radio show, and was the sort of person who could – in the late 1930s, while the Depression raged and Fascism rose – skive off to Europe to self-diagnose his malaise, have an epiphany while drunk alone in a bar in Berlin, and then immediately arrange an archeological expedition to Central Asia with his Soviet counterparts as a cure.  He was also afraid of snakes.  He was a man of his times, though, and this book was written in 1942 and published in 1943, during the nadir of WWII, so there is some brutally casual racism – particularly toward the Japanese – and sexism (at one point he refers to Smith as a “girls’ college”).  He was a naturalist at a time when that meant shooting most of what he wanted to study and he was not shy about that either.  And there are some curious omissions here, such as the entire Great Depression (which appears but once, in an aside about not being particularly concerned with personal wealth – you’d think his fundraising difficulties as Museum director in the late 1930s were just the normal woes of any nonprofit).  But even with all that, this is a fascinating story of a bold and interesting man.

Bossypants (Tina Fey)

I read the first half of this in hard copy, and then – because Kim was coincidentally listening to the audio book and we were driving to visit a friend several hours away – I listened to the second half of it as read by the author.  Honestly, I think I prefer to read it myself, though I can’t say this is Tina Fey’s fault.  It’s just how I prefer to read.  This is a memoir of sorts, hitting some of the high points (comedic or otherwise) of Tina Fey’s life, though not exhaustive enough to be a biography.  She writes about her time on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, in Chicago at Second City, and – my favorite parts – growing up in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby at about the same time I was growing up perhaps a dozen miles away.  Let’s just say I recognized some of the landmarks, and her characterization was spot on.  There were a few laugh-out-loud moments and a few thought-provoking ones and the book went down smooth and easy like a cold glass of water on a hot day, and if you’re looking for something light and funny this is a good place to start.

Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys: Great Writers on Great Places, Vol. 1 (Klara Glowczewska, ed.)

This is another in my continuing series of books that allow me to travel without actually having to travel, which I suspect is probably more in line with my character than actually traveling.  Oh, I read the 21 essays in this book and thought “I’d like to go there!” for about half of them, and even the other half were interesting, but I know this is likely as close to those places as I will ever get.  It’s a good thing that these essays were all marvelously written.  From Florida to England, Ethiopia to the Himalayas, Jordan to Iceland, and a rather extended stay in Italy, the authors traveled, experienced the landscape and cultural bits, and then reported back to the rest of us what we were missing.  There were a few funny bits and some sad ones, and in the end you are left with the sense that it is indeed a great colorful world out there for those who wish to go see it.  I picked this up at a library sale and it came with a Vol. 2, but perhaps I’ll get to that another time.

Brit-Think, Ameri-Think: A Transatlantic Survival Guide (Jane Walmsley)

I first discovered this book in an airport in 1990.  I had just taken my first flight – a puddle-jumper from Philadelphia to New York City – and had a six-hour layover before continuing on to London to visit my friend Julie at Cambridge.  I enjoyed the bit of it I read, and always meant to buy a copy but somehow never did.  It was thus something of a triumph to come into this copy – an original 1986 British edition rather than the more recent (and since revised) Penguin edition, and full of jaunty illustrations.  Walmsley writes in broad stereotypes that contain large grains of truth as long as you don’t think too hard about them, and she can often be illuminating.  For example, Americans, she says, consider death to be optional, which explains their attitudes toward self-improvement, dieting, and any number of other things, while Britons just live their lives in the full knowledge of their limited span on earth and thus spend their lives in a state of quiet resignation that makes it seem futile to complain about discomforts.  As an American who has visited Britain a couple of times, I can’t say that anything in here struck me as particularly wrong, though some things were of more limited application than Walmsley claims (she’s very focused on a fairly affluent, cosmopolitan section of each country’s population, for example, which means that her observations may not penetrate very far into the rest of American or British society).  The book is clearly a product of the 1980s, with the cultural references and political sensibilities of the time, and this can be jarring thirty years later in a much more polarized and downcast time, but it’s a fun book that has some useful insights to offer.

A History of Modern Britain (Andrew Marr)

This is a dense but readable history of Britain from the end of WWII, in 1945, though to when it was published in 2007.  As such the first part of it covers much the same ground as David Kynaston’s New Jerusalem series that I’ve been keeping up with, but it is much more of a traditional history, focused on the political leaders, broad cultural developments, and economic shifts of the period rather than the immersive day-to-day social history that Kynaston wrote about the everyday lives of ordinary Britons.  Marr does a good job of walking through the main political, cultural, and economic developments of the post-WWII period – the New Jerusalem of Attlee, the reaction that brought Churchill back to power, the grappling with being a declining imperial power, the hard times of the 1970s when Britain was deemed “ungovernable,” the Thatcher revolution (while generally evenhanded and willing to cite flaws wherever he sees them, Marr clearly admires Thatcher and her policies), and the drift of the Major/Blair years.  This is a book that was not meant for the American market, and as such it is enlightening for an American reader to see how the US is portrayed – generally as an ally, often as a threat, and not uncommonly as a rather dimwitted source of dubious cultural values imported into Britain (consumer culture and the flashy, substance-light, almost-but-not-really-left politics of style popularized by Bill Clinton and adopted by Tony Blair being among the things that Marr is not entirely happy about).  Marr also reserves his epilogue for a warning on climate change, something else that would not likely have been included in an American book.  Marr is a lively writer who can toss off an occasional epigram worth remembering (“When you free people, you can never be sure what you are freeing them for”), and this is an invaluable asset in a book as long and detailed as this one.

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (Chuck Palahniuk)

Chuck Palahniuk isn’t the easiest author to read in the best of circumstances, and in this book he sets out to make it harder by making the title character the empty hole around which the book orbits, and then telling the story in so many different voices that the list of “Contributors” is nearly five pages long.  The subject matter only complicates things further.  For all that, though, it is an entertaining book and one that has a lot to say.  Buster (“Rant”) Casey is a high school rebel, masochist, ladies’ man, and the epicenter of the world’s worst outbreak of rabies.  He lives in a not-too-distant future where people have been sorted into Daytimers and Nighttimers in order to ease crowding – curfews are strict and violators subject to severe punishment – and where one of the primary forms of entertainment is Party Crashing, a fairly rule-bound automotive game where the goal is to crash into other participants.  Rant, whose fiery death is presaged from nearly the first page of this book, starts out in the small town of Middleton before moving to the unnamed big city, where he joins with the Party Crashers.  Each chapter includes anywhere from a few to a handful of people telling the story as they saw it – Echo Lawrence and Shot Dunyun (fellow Party Crashers with their own backstories), Irene and Chester Casey (Rant’s parents, which gets surprisingly complicated once the time-travel is figured in), Bacon Carlysle (“Childhood Enemy”), Green Taylor Simms (“Historian”), Tina Somebody (Graphic Traffic newscaster) and so on – and these extremely unreliable narrators often disagree fiercely with each other over the events of the story.  Rant is only seen by others and has no voice himself in the book other than what other people report him saying.  If you want a thought-provoking but often somewhat mystifying book, this is your place.

The Collapsing Empire (John Scalzi)

You pretty much know what you’re going to get from one of John Scalzi’s books.  It will be a light, fast read, entertaining and generally well written, painstakingly diverse and equally painstakingly not making a big deal of being so, with a few funny lines and some well-paced action.  And if you’re lucky you can get it autographed on a book tour, as he was gracious enough to do for me with this copy.  This is clearly the first of a new space opera series, now that the Old Man’s War series has matured.  Humanity long ago lost track of the Earth and now lives in widely scattered settlements connected by the Flow, a dimension outside of the usual time and space that allows the appearance of faster-than-light travel without the mucking about with the time stream that this often entails.  These settlements are also linked by the Interdependency, ruled by an emperox and led economically by a powerful set of guilds.  Cardenia is about to become emperox, much to her dismay.  Marce is the son of a count on the planet End, which is called that because it’s as far from the Hub as the Flow goes.  End is in the middle of one of its periodic rebellions, but this one is both different in nature, being orchestrated by one of the guild houses, and far more significant, since the Flow is collapsing and humanity is facing a dismal future in a universe where its settlements really are interdependent and likely to fail without the connections made possible by the Flow.  The book moves along nicely, and it comes to an end precisely where you’d expect the second book to pick up.  So now we wait for the second book.

A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry (Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger)

Everything eventually becomes tourism, and atomic bombs are no exception.  There are museums, visitor centers, and guidebooks for many of the sites that were and remain important to the American nuclear arsenal, and in this entertaining book Hodge and Weinberger decide to go on a road trip to see them all.  Their journey takes them to some of the old Manhattan Project sites in Tennessee and New Mexico, missile silos in Nebraska, and eventually to Kazakhstan, Russia, and Iran.  Along the way they meet any number of people of varying helpfulness (Russian nuclear personnel are distinctly unconcerned with allowing Hodge and Weinberger to see anything of interest, while the missileers of the American midwest are, not surprisingly, fairly open) and see more than their share of interesting things.  They don’t really get to their main point until the epilogue, where – their travels now behind them – they finally feel free to express themselves.  There are many skilled and passionate people involved in nuclear weapons work, they write, and nobody’s got a plan for any of it.  Why do we have these weapons?  What purpose do they serve?  How do they fit into the warfare of the future?  Diplomacy?  Anything?  This was written in 2007, so it stands as a monument of a time when people felt that there was something to be done with nuclear weapons – when American policy was not in the hands of an idiot who casually demanded that the US triple its nuclear weapons only to have military officials solemnly declare he must have been joking, when Russia was seen as a bumbling former enemy rather than the unseen hand behind the American presidency, and when North Korea was still a joke.  The book has a certain playfulness to it, despite its serious topic, and you just can’t imagine that tone being taken with a similar book written today.

Artemis (Andy Weir)

Jazz Bashara lives on the moon, in a city called Artemis.  It’s the only city there, and like any city it has its class structure and its immigrant culture.  There are the wealthy and the poor, and – in the grand tradition of chain migration – each trade seems to be dominated by a single ethnic group.  In Jazz’s case, her father, like most Saudis, is a welder.  Set in a near future where the Kenyans largely control space travel, Artemis is a city on the make.  Jazz works as a porter – a glorified delivery girl – and moonlights as a smuggler.  When one of her clients tempts her into a drastically stupid and illegal job that has deadly consequences, it launches into motion a series of increasingly desperate moves by Jazz, her law-enforcement nemesis Rudy (with whom she is on friendly if vaguely antagonistic terms), old friends and second-hand loves, Artemis officials and Brazilian mafiosi that ends with a suitably raucous bang that has more than a few tonal references to Casablanca.  Jazz is an endearingly disheveled heroine and the narrative moves along smartly, and if the book is not quite as good as Weir’s first novel, The Martian, well, that’s a pretty high standard to match.  For anyone who is looking for a combination of crime thriller, space science fiction adventure, and accessible primer on low-gravity science, this is a good place to start.

Half a King (Joe Abercrombie)

We live in a golden age of YA fiction, with any number of great writers focusing on coming of age stories designed to appeal to young adults but worth reading even for those of us who passed that stage a long time ago.  This is the first volume of Joe Abercrombie’s Shattered Sea series – a different universe from his First Law series – and I was curious as to how his talents would translate.  From this book, pretty well.  It’s a grim world though far less grim than the First Law, and the writing has a bit less of the bleak humor that made the First Law universe so morbidly appealing, but overall the book is well written and fast-moving.  Yarvi is the second son of the King of Gettland, a small kingdom in what was probably once Scandinavia millennia prior (there are any number of references to “elf” cities or other things, all of which have the hallmarks of vague references to our own civilization long after some apocalyptic event – apparently we become elves in the future).  With his withered left hand and peaceable if Machiavellian temperament, he is ill-suited to be the sort of warrior king that Gettland demands, so he is happy to be studying to be a Minister – a sort of cross between a priest, a shaman, and a healer.  When his father and older brother are killed, however, he becomes the new king.  And when he is subsequently betrayed (as predicted on the jacket cover, so it’s not any great spoiler), he becomes many things.  Oar slave.  Fugitive.  Supplicant.  Friend.  This is a story of revenge served cold, of events shaping a clever but callow boy into a man.  The ending feels a bit forced and the world is a bit thinner than prime Abercrombie, but it works well.

Half the World (Joe Abercrombie)

One of Joe Abercrombie’s strengths as a writer is dealing with multiple POV characters.  Probably his most virtuouso performance of that came in a single chapter of Heroes describing a battle, where the point of view shifted from soldier to soldier as each was killed, following the killer until moving on to the next.  With Half the World, Abercrombie pulls off another POV switch, though perhaps a less ambitious one.  Yarvi now recedes into the background, a mover of events and puller of strings, but the focus here is on two younger characters.  Thorn is a natural born soldier, but unfortunately for her Gettland doesn’t hold much with female warriors.  Brand wants to be a soldier but he thinks too much for the kind of blunt warfare that the Shattered Sea kingdoms practice.  When he quietly stands up for Thorn after she is mistreated by her training master, it sets off a long adventure.  Gettland is in trouble and needs allies.  Yarvi is sure those allies can be found in the Empress of the South, which is a long hard boat trip away.  He recruits Brand, Thorn, and a crew of strong but seriously disreputable men – and two other women, one a merchant and one whose exact nature is unclear but who is there to train Thorn to be a killer – and off they go.  They bond, they fight, they work, and if it isn’t how they think it’s going to be, it still moves along.  Thorn makes her name and becomes tale told by bards.  Brand earns his name as well.  And despite the middle third where the YA nature of the book does actually become clear, they find each other.  The last part of the book takes place back in Gettland, where great events are afoot, and it sets us up for the final volume of the series pretty well.

Half a War (Joe Abercrombie)

For all that this is essentially a Viking saga, with burly bearded warriors, longboats, queens, and thralls, it is also set recognizably in the distant future, a place where our own society is dimly remembered, where our ruins shadow the kingdoms of the Shattered Sea as those of Rome shadowed dark-ages Europe, and where we, the creators of those ruins, are seen as elves – mystical creatures beyond human abilities or knowledge who destroyed themselves.  It’s probably not a coincidence that those who walk through the hearts of the old elf ruins sicken and die a couple of weeks later.  Abercrombie once again shifts POV characters, leaving Thorn, Koll, Rin, and Brand from the second book and Yarvi from the first to serve as important but noncentral characters.  Here the burden is shouldered by Skara – princess of Throvenland, a kingdom destroyed by the High King and his mercenary Bright Yilling, who worships only Death – and Raith, a vicious young warrior of Vasterland.  Here all the schemes and plans of the previous books converge until little is left standing, though both Skara and Raith will grow, mature, deepen, collide and move apart.  Abercrombie is good at developing characters with depth – even his villains have a certain sympathy to them, though in a twisted sort of “be glad you don’t have to hang out with this guy” kind of way (Bright Yilling has some of the best lines in the series).  And when it all comes crashing down at the end, the world of the Shattered Sea will be a very different place than it was before.  Abercrombie leaves room for a next book, and I hope he follows up on that.

Belgium: A History (Bernard A. Cook)

Since we now have an actual Belgian living with us I figured I should learn a few things about the place, so I checked a couple of books out of the library.  This looked like a good introduction, and in some senses it was – it covers a lot of ground in a fairly small number of pages – and in other senses, well, let’s just say that Cook is a fairly typical example of why books written by historians don’t get read very much.  But if you can fight your way through his dull, dry prose, you will in fact learn a few things about the country he describes.  Mostly you learn that Belgium is a small place that has been fought over by larger powers for millennia, that it has existed as an independent nation for less than two centuries, and that it is a sterling example of what happens when cultural differences cannot easily be bridged through political processes.  Cook walks through the history of what will become Belgium from the first vague reference in a Roman text though the swirl of medieval and Renaissance provinces to independence in 1830, and from there through the beginning of the 21st century as the Dutch-speaking Flemish in the north conflict with the French-speaking Walloons in the south.  I was surprised at how Catholic the country is – in my mind I had always previously lumped it together with the fiercely Protestant Netherlands that way – and Belgium clearly has an interesting history.  Perhaps a better writer would have made that fact more obvious, though.

The Politics of Belgium: Governing a Divided Society (2e) (Kris Deschouwer)

On the plus side, Deschouwer is a better writer than Cook, which, granted, is not hard.  On the down side, this is a pretty dense monograph about what it means to try to govern a society that has slowly dissolved into mutually incompatible groups based on language and territory.  Deschouwer starts with a brief overview of Belgium’s history since independence in 1830 and then spends the rest of this jargon-filled, chart-laden book minutely parsing out the political parties that rule the country, the governance structures in which they work (or don’t quite work, as the case may be), and the issues that are pretty much structurally incapable of being resolved with which they deal.  For a country the size of Maryland, it is remarkably divided – there isn’t a single political party today that even pretends to represent the whole country, for example, though there are “party families” that do.  But the Flemish version and the Walloon version of those parties often have very different goals and methods.  Add in a newly federalized and highly decentralized political system with near-constant elections, incredibly flexible arrangements for who actually serves what term in what body regardless of election results, and a strong attachment to the superstructures of the EU, and it’s a wonder the country still functions at all at a national level.  The entire concept of a government that comes to power only after a detailed contract with its coalition partners spelling out what issues will be addressed on what timeline, from which no deviance is tolerated without further detailed negotiation, is something that doesn’t really translate well to outsiders, I think – at least not to this outsider, anyway.  How does that even work in practice?  If you think American politics is complicated, Belgian politics will be an eye-opener.  This was a useful book, though between it and Cook’s I still have no real idea of the culture and everyday life of the country.  I’ll have to keep reading, I guess, and it does help to have someone living with us who can talk to us about what it’s like to live there.

Science Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness (Zach Wienersmith)

For a book that has barely sixty 3”x3” pages, it does pack in an outsize amount of fun.  The book is pretty much exactly what the title indicates – a quick walk through any number of scientific fields in which nothing in particular is incorrect yet taken as a whole it still doesn’t quite feel right.  For example, the entry on thermodynamics reads, in its entirety, “The study of how everything is getting worse all the time, and how if you speed that up a little you can run an engine.”  This is, of course, 100% accurate and completely useless as far as understanding thermodynamics.  It was a fun way to end the reading year.


Total Books: 68
Total Pages: 21,237
Pages/day: 58.2

Happy Reading!

Books Read in 2017, Part 3

Part 3!  Come for the books, stay for more books!

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Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language (Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman)

Since the most recent installment in the Laundry Files wasn’t due to be released for another two weeks, I had to take a break and read other things.  This is a fairly light romp through the weirder corners of the English language and is pretty much exactly what the subtitle says it is.  O’Connor – who is clearly the lead figure in this authorial pair, though whether she was the lead writer is an open question I suppose – cycles through any number of common ideas about the origins of phrases, the propriety of grammatical forms, and so on, gleefully demonstrating that the stories you have heard from your teachers, editors, and barfly friends are incorrect.  The villains in her world are the 18th-century Latinists who insisted that the English language – a Germanic tongue – behave more like Latin and therefore imposed all kinds of strange grammatical and spelling requirements upon unsuspecting English speakers.  It’s a fun book for those of us who are language nerds, but probably not for anyone else.

A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance (William Manchester)

I have long adored this book solely for the title, which is one of the most evocative descriptions of medieval Europe (and all of the human-centered globe prior to the late 19th century) that I have ever heard, though I had not read the book until now.  The book itself is both fascinating and fragmented – three almost completely separate sections loosely connected by the original purpose of Manchester’s investigations into this period, which was to write a short introduction to a biography of Ferdinand Magellan.  The first section – by far my favorite – is a brief overview of the late medieval European mindset.  This was a world where, with vanishingly few exceptions, nothing major had changed in nearly a thousand years.  People assumed that all knowledge was already known.  Life was cheap, brutal, often ugly, and generally short, but within its compass lightened by enough humanity to get by.  This is his baseline.  The second, much longer section, is a detailed description of Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church.  Manchester loves the details, and the sexual license, corruption, nepotism, and power struggles of the late medieval papacy are intricately set forth (one almost but not quite achieves a certain sympathy for Lucrezia Borgia), while Luther himself emerges as a complex, driven, and entirely unlovable figure, very much a creature of his late medieval upbringing despite his critical role in bringing that era to an end.  He also seems to have had an overwhelming anal fixation that later generations have mostly ignored in the interest of propriety but which fit the crude, violent medieval culture that produced him quite well.  The final section is also quite detailed – a blow-by-blow account of Magellan’s trip around the world, the first such expedition to make that journey even if Magellan himself foolishly threw his life away near the midpoint of it.  Manchester makes the interesting point that the first person to actually circumnavigate the globe was Magellan’s slave Enrique who was born in the southwest Pacific, taken to Europe as a slave, and then returned home from the east on Magellan’s ships.  This is an episodic book that doesn’t really hang together, but is well worth reading for its parts.

The Delirium Brief (Charles Stross)

The fecal matter has hit the rotary air mover in the world of the Laundry.  With the catastrophic events at Leeds covered in The Nightmare Stacks, the Laundry is now fully public and, for the first time in several books, the focus shifts back to Bob Howard.  Bob is now the public face of an organization that is overstretched, deeply suspect, and threatened by two interlocking enemies.  On the one hand, there is the Sleeper in the Pyramid, an occult force of unspeakable horror working through its old agent, American evangelical leader Raymond Schiller.  On the other hand, there is the British government, an organization composed of precisely the kind of currently fashionable and violently ignorant free-market ideologues who would be open to shutting the Laundry down hard and then privatizing it.  The fact that Schiller is leading the American corporate group that is stepping in to provide those services once the Laundry is privatized is just extra.  The Black Chamber (the US version of the Laundry) has been co-opted and turned.  Old enemies will re-emerge in new lights, under the slogan “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  Old friends will see their resolve tested, their lives threatened, and their best work turned inside out.  Bob – the heir of Angleton and now a Deeply Scary Sorcerer and high muckmuck himself – is left to work with the Senior Auditor, Persephone, Johnny, Mhari, Mo, Brains, Alex, and Cassie in a fugitive rump version of the Laundry to head off the worst by bringing about the second worst.  And on that dark note, we await the next novel.

Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (William Rosen)

From small things come great changes.  This is, essentially, the point of this book – an examination of the heyday and collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire (sometimes called the Byzantine Empire) as seen through the lens of the Plague of Justinian, the first documented major pandemic of what we now know as bubonic plague.  Documented is, of course, a relative term – events from the 6th century CE were hardly documented at all by modern standards, and time and distance have each taken their toll on the historical record.  So Rosen divides his book into four broad sections.  The first basically sets up the Eastern Roman Empire, tracing its emergence from the wreckage of the older and more united Roman Empire, as well as noting the rise to prominence of its most talented and famous ruler, Justinian.  The second section describes Justinian’s zenith – roughly the decade between 530 and 540 CE – and spends a great deal of time on such things as the construction of the Hagia Sophia, the civic politics of Constantinople, and the wars of conquest fought by Justinian’s generals, notably Belisarius.  The third section is narrowly focused on the plague itself – the life cycle and structure of the bacterium, the vectors of transmission and how climate factored in, trade relations and their impact, and so on.  Finally, there is a fourth section describing the political and military impact of the plague on the empire, notably in contrast to the Persians and the later Islamic powers.  Much of the book is therefore tangential to the disease itself, though Rosen tells his story entertainingly well.

This Other London: Adventures in the Overlooked City (John Rogers)

For someone who is not much of a traveler, I do enjoy travel memoirs.  This one is a bit unusual in that the traveling is not all that far from the author’s home in London.  Rogers – whom I suspect I would know if I were English, since he does give off the vibe of a minor celebrity comfortable within his level of fame – is an urban explorer of a particularly British sort, the kind that is prone to long ambling walks through unheralded corners of the vast metropolis that is London.  The book is divided into ten chapters, each detailing a specific jaunt through bits of London not often seen by anyone who doesn’t live there.  Rogers has a good grasp of the fact that the landscape is just a story prompt and he is a lively and generally enjoyable companion that way.  Each chapter is prefaced with a fairly useless map – unless you’re familiar with the area to start with it won’t help, particularly since many of the landmarks he discusses aren’t on them – and occasionally graced with black and white photos that give off an air of being far murkier than they actually are.  It’s astonishing how much green space London still had  in 2014, when this book was published, and it did make me want to visit again.

Prince of Thorns (Mark Lawrence)

Honorous Jorg Ancrath – Jorg to his Brothers – is, by his own description, an amoral sociopath.  It’s not a bad thing for the leader of a band of professional mercenaries to be.  He’s also thirteen when this book opens (fifteen when it ends), what we would call a PTSD case if this were set in our current world, and, just to add to his burden, the heir to the throne of Ancrath, one of a set of tiny little kingdoms that have been at war for generations in an attempt to restore the broken empire.  Jorg is driven, lucky, and callously cruel, and when he breaks off his aimless quest for destruction – itself a break from his quest for vengeance – to return to Ancrath and confront his father, it goes about as well as can be expected.  Eventually he sets out on yet another quest, one that he hopes will lead to his long-term goal of becoming the new emperor.  He just might do it, at that.  This is a dark, violent, unapologetically grim and bleakly cynical book of sorcery and swords – the first of a series – that appears to be set in what was once northern France about a millennium after our civilization disappeared in a blinding flash of apocalyptic nightmares.  Jorg reads ancient Greek philosophers and refers to the Pope (a woman, apparently) but knows little about our civilization, which he and others refer to as the Builders.  All of the setting arrives in small doses that become more pointed as the book rolls on – the fate of Castle Red leaves little doubt as to the nature of the apocalypse, though I’m not convinced those devices actually work that way.  I was given this series by my nephew as a return for lending him Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, and I can see how this seemed an appropriate response.  It’s well written and pulls you along, and so to the next volume.

King of Thorns (Mark Lawrence)

Prince Jorg of Ancrath is now King Jorg of the Rennar Highlands, thanks to his victory over his uncle, and he has work to do.  He plans to be emperor, to restore the throne lost for over a century.  He longs for his newfound aunt (roughly his age), Katherine ap Scarron.  And he seeks, not absolution, but knowledge of his guilt, of the shade of the dead child who haunts him.  Jorg remains brutal and violent in a fairly realistic medieval sort of way that William Manchester probably would have approved of, and the story follows three separate tracks – one set four years earlier, shortly after the events of Prince of Thorns, which sees Jorg traveling across what was once Europe, battling armies and firemages, trolls and kings; a second set in the present day as the massed armies of Orrin of Arrow seek to reduce Jorg’s castle to rubble; and a third as Katherine slowly wakes to her own story on the pages of her diary.  And all the while the long backstory of the Builders, who destroyed their civilization in a day of Burning Suns, comes closer and closer to the surface.  It’s an odd thing to combine epic fantasy with post-apocalyptic storytelling, but Lawrence pulls it off well.  This is a dark, brooding series full of characters nobody should be cheering for, but it works well.

Emperor of Thorns (Mark Lawrence)

With one crown already achieved, Jorg of Ancrath seeks the biggest crown of all – to become the new Emperor of what was once Europe.  Like the other books, this one follows multiple storylines separated by a number of years – Jorg’s procession, accompanied by his wife and, eventually, new son, to Vyene (Vienna) for the Congression that will choose the new emperor, his trips to Iberia (mostly a poisoned land from the Builders’ Suns of a millennium earlier) and Muslim Afrique five years prior, and the ongoing story of Chella, the necromancer who holds the key to Jorg’s life in some ways.  It’s a dark, violent, and bleak story of power and warfare and what it means to achieve your goal in order to sacrifice it for a larger cause.  The backstory of the Builders (i.e. us) intrudes more and more, and the damage they caused to Jorg’s world becomes central to the plot.  It was a well-written series, and worth the time.

The Management Style of the Supreme Beings (Tom Holt)

Tom Holt is slowly carving out a niche writing books that take a macroeconomic approach to myth and legend, and since I enjoyed The Outsourcerer’s Apprentice I figured I’d like this one as well.  And, indeed, I did.  It starts with a buyout of the right to be the gods of Earth, when two figures known as Dad and Jay (his son) decide that they’ve had enough and sell out to the Venturi Brothers, Ab and Snib.  The Venturis don’t believe in right and wrong.  They believe in capitalism and wealth and the right to do whatever you can afford to do.  Crime drops, productivity soars, all of Earth’s problems seem to end, and everyone is miserable.  Meanwhile Kevin – Jay’s lesser known brother – is walking around trying to do good, in flat violation of the contract of sale.  Uncle Nick’s realm of Flipside is left as an autonomous republic, with no new arrivals but the continuation of the old ones.  The human employees of both Dad and Uncle Nick – Lucy and Bernie, respectively – have to find new things to do.  An adventurer named Jersey Thorpe rattles around causing trouble.  And a former thunder god known as Father Christmas is throwing a large wrench into it all.  It’s a complex, oddball take on religion, morality, and economics, and it hums along nicely with a few laughs.  It’s not one of his best – the plot never quite gels and it wraps up rather abruptly – but even a lesser Holt novel is better than most of the things that are out there.

[A Book About My Old Museum] (The Current Assistant Director)

It’s kind of strange to read a book that has your own picture in it, but there it is.  For five years, between 2002 and 2007, I ran the museum that is the subject of this book.  They were tumultuous years, with my primary focus being a construction project designed to put up a new addition on the footprint of the part of the original structure that had fallen down more than half a century earlier.  And if you think doing a construction project on a National Historic Landmark using federal money filtered down through state and local agencies isn’t going to create enough bureaucracy to beggar the imagination, you can think again.  But it’s up, and the bureaucrat who most devoted his life to sabotaging that project has retired and gone to hell, I imagine.  This is one of those books that historical societies put out to sell in the gift shop, and it does a nice job of giving you the basic history of the place, the people who founded it, and the events that separate that founding from today.  It also has a whole pile of photographs, including my very favorite from my time there – a shot of the founder’s son sitting on a stump, c.1910, looking for all the world like he swallowed a bug.  It’s nice to have all those photos and stories in one place.

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (Mary Roach)

If there is any overriding lesson to be learned from this engaging and often laugh-out-loud funny survey of the science of human sexuality it is that those who engage in such research are a hardy and often persecuted breed.  Roach goes into great detail about the legal, cultural, and religious opposition those intrepid researchers have faced and, in many places including the US, still face, and in the end you can’t help but have a certain admiration for those brave researchers and their even braver subjects who spend their time advancing the frontiers of knowledge and their own sexual activities.  Roach has a dry, often subversive humor that delights in oddities and juxtapositions and she’s not afraid to become a subject if that’s what it takes to get the researchers to show her what they’re up to (her husband, she says, deserves a medal for being a good sport and occasional participant with her).  The science is sound though often cringeworthy – particularly her in-depth chapters on cures for erectile dysfunction, which often seem worse than the initial problem (hint: those of us who own one of those organs really don’t enjoy descriptions of penises that contain the word “degloving,” and you can look that up on your own, thank you very much).  For all that, however, it’s a breezy read, which is a testament to Roach’s writing skills.

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

Hiro Protagonist – perhaps the greatest character name in all of literature – is a hacker, someone who makes his living on the ragged edge of computer programming.  He lives in a world where most of the institutions of society have broken down.  What was once the United States is pockmarked with franchise statelets, corporate rulers, and lawless enclaves, and while technically there is a federal government nobody pays it much attention.  When the book opens Hiro is a pizza delivery guy working for the Mafia, a prestigious and highly skilled position in a nation where the Mafia is completely above board if otherwise unchanged.  When a delivery goes wrong, he ends up in an odd alliance with Y.T., a 15-year-old girl who works as a Kourier, riding a high tech skateboard through the urban jungles of southern California to deliver whatever is asked.  Like the Mafia, Kouriers are a closed society with their own code of honor.  The plot spirals out to include a frighteningly efficient Aleut killer named Raven, a floating religious colony known as the Raft, Hiro’s ex-girlfriend Juanita, Sumerian mythology and the power of incantatory words, and what would now be referred to as an online world known as the Metaverse (the book, published in 1992, is one of the earliest cyberpunk novels of online worlds).  It centers on a visual virus – a pattern that can literally rewire the brains of those susceptible to it, leading to the Snow Crash of the title, a reference to any computer crash so severe that it destroys the ability of the computer to function and leaves only snow on the monitor.  And from there it gets strange.  Stephenson is a phenomenal writer who can pack a story with ideas, and while this one ends with the abruptness of a writer who seems to have gotten tired of the plot – there are more than a few loose ends, including, for example, the ultimate fate of Da5id, Hiro’s hacker colleague in the Metaverse – he does keep you entertained and engaged for the whole time.

Monty Python’s Tunisian Holiday: My Life With Brian, a Memoir (Kim “Howard” Johnson)

This book is what happens when rabid fans are allowed to interact with their idols.  Johnson was an Illinois teenager in the early 1970s when he stumbled into Monty Python’s Flying Circus on his local PBS station.  Entranced, he became their biggest and most persistent fan.  He started his own fanzine (it was the 70s, after all).  He wrote to them.  And they wrote back.  More amazingly, they invited him to see them if he ever went to London, and so he did.  Surprisingly enough, he managed to form friendships with his idols, so much so that when they went to Tunisia to film Life of Brian, Johnson flew over to join them and chronicle the filming.  As one might expect from this set-up, Johnson’s chronicle borders on hagiography, though with enough of a sense of paparazzi to keep it just this side of honest.  Johnson was an exhaustive recorder, one who seems not to have missed a conversation or an action, however small, and most of it ends up here.  On the other hand, he was genuinely fascinated by the Pythons and their assorted hangers on, he had incredible access to them all, and he ended up deeply involved in the film itself – he served as a still photographer, a gopher, and, like almost everyone else who was there, he ended up playing several different roles as an extra.  It’s an odd and compulsive book, unsettling in its fervid devotion but interesting for its good-hearted love of its subjects and for its deeply insider view of the behind-the-scenes story of one of the classic films of the late 20th century.  Having rewatched Life of Brian a couple of years ago it’s clear to me that the film really hasn’t held up as well as Holy Grail has – unless you are familiar with the infinitely fractal splintering of Marxist revolutionary groups in the 1970s, for example, a lot of the humor is lost – but it remains a monument to its time.  I actually listened to the audiobook version of this book as I drove back and forth to Philadelphia in September and I am never sure if that counts as a book being read, but it’s my blog and I suppose I can count it if I choose to do so.

Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll (Joe Oestreich)

Like most college students, I played in a band.  It’s great fun and requires no particular talent.  We occasionally wondered what it would be like to pursue musical fame and fortune rather than our actual careers, but never seriously, at least not on my part.  Joe Oestriech took it seriously.  He and his friend Colin Gawel first formed a band in high school in Columbus OH, a band that eventually morphed into Watershed.  At the end of their junior year at Ohio State they dropped out and went all-in for the band, and they almost made it.  They had a couple of popular songs – not hits, precisely, but songs that got regional and perhaps even national airplay for a time, and they were especially popular in Wisconsin (even if I never heard of them) – and they were signed by a major label for an agonizingly brief period in the 90s.  But that’s as far as they got.  This book is a memoir of a band that almost but not quite made it big, and it follows two tracks.  There’s a present-day track from about 2010 or so (the book was published in 2012, so it wasn’t all that long before that) as Watershed goes on a final three-week tour to see if there’s any point to it all for a bunch of late-30-something rockers with wives and day jobs (Oestreich, by this time, is working as a creative writing professor at a university in Tacoma – which, happily, means that the book is engagingly written).  And there’s a memory track, which follows the creation and life of the band – its ups and down scrabbling to hit The Pros.  Both tracks are full of interesting characters (Biggie, their devoted manager/roadie/van driver; Superfans I and II, the closest to groupies they have; any number of bartenders who make their lives more pleasant and record execs who don’t; Oestriech’s wife Kate, whom he started dating when he was a college junior and she was a high school sophomore; and so on) and well-told stories, and if by the time we get to the end there is little doubt as to where the band will end up it is still a fun ride while it lasts.  Rock and roll isn’t dead – it’s just hiding in bars.

Books Read in 2017, Part 2

Part 2!  The reading continues!

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The Magicians Trilogy (Lev Grossman)

The Magicians

This is a book that rewards repeated readings.  I first read this a few years ago and while I liked it enough to go on to the second volume I don’t think I really got the book until I read it for the second time, particularly in light of its sequel.  The set-up is pretty straightforward, and one that moves from Hogwarts to Narnia as the book progresses.  Quentin Coldwater lives in Brooklyn and spends most of time third-wheeling with his friends James and Julia.  On the way to an interview with a Princeton alum things get weird and he suddenly finds himself at Brakebills – a college in upstate New York designed to teach actual magicians, users of spellcraft and wizardry.  There he makes a few friends – Eliot, Janet, Josh, maybe Penny if you stretch it – and finds a girlfriend in Alice.  He is tested, both personally and academically, and eventually he graduates, after which he and his circle spend some meaningless time in the mundane world before they discover (as is pretty much foretold from the inside cover) a pathway into Fillory – the setting for a series of books beloved in Quentin’s circles but much to their surprise a real and genuinely dangerous place.  The Magicians is in many ways about power – what it means to acquire it, what it means to wield it, what it means when it isn’t enough.  It is about loss, and what it means to lose things you cannot recover.  It’s a surprisingly bitter and bittersweet story in many ways, one whose deepening meaning emerges only slowly.  I think Quentin is a much more sympathetic character this time around than I did the first time, and knowing the second book let me pay attention to Julia more closely as well.

The Magician King

This is the book that justified the first one, as far as I am concerned.  It’s a much darker and angrier story, one that focuses on the consequences of both getting and not getting what you want.  It starts in Fillory, where Eliot, Quentin, Julia, and Janet are now kings and queens and, honestly, a bit bored.  When a random hunting expedition goes horribly wrong it sends Quentin out on a Quest, and when that turns out to be both different and more complicated than the random lark it started out to be, things get very serious very quickly.  Interspersed with this is Julia’s backstory – how she too was chosen for Brakebills but failed the exam that Quentin passed, and how her life spiraled down into darkness, anger, resentment, and the unofficial side of magic, a side far rougher and with fewer rules.  The stories never quite converge, but by the end Julia is transformed utterly, and Quentin has learned the great lesson that the hero is not the one who reaps the rewards.  The hero is the one who pays the price. 

The Magician’s Land

After the hero has paid the price, life still goes on.  Quentin, exiled from Fillory, finds a teaching job at Brakebills that is as comfortable as it is short lived, and when he finds himself exiled once again he ends up involved in a seedy magical heist, one that promises to give him the financial resources to attempt the only thing he still wants to try here on Earth – rescuing Alice from the fate that awaited her at the end of the first book.  When the heist goes wrong – as you always know it will - he finds himself plunged ever deeper into the crisis of Fillory, which is in its death-throes.  With a former student named Plum, he will seek power and wisdom and find them in ways he did not expect, while Janet, Eliot, Josh, and Poppy work from inside to save Fillory.  The two stories merge of course, and eventually most – though not all - of the loose ends get tied up in a way that is both melancholy and satisfying.  Quentin Coldwater has grown up – "He wasn't that boy anymore, that boy was lost long ago.  He'd become a man instead, one of those crude, weather-beaten, shopworn things, and he'd almost forgotten he'd ever been anything else" – and if his new world isn't what he thought it would be, it is, perhaps, what he might have wanted if he'd known.  This series is, at bottom, the story of a young man whose belief that the world owes him something is thoroughly shattered, and what happens next.  Grossman leaves himself space for a further volume in this story, and I hope he uses it.  I'd like to know what happens to these characters, now that the main story has ended.

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (Denise Kiernan)

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, didn't exist as a town until 1943.  By 1944 there were more than 78,000 people living there, and the population was over 100,000 if you counted the people who commuted in.  It was a secret place, blanketed with a security so thick that even the mention of its name was enough to get people in deep trouble.  Its sole purpose was to enrich uranium - to take the naturally-occurring 0.7% of U235 in a larger sample of U238 and bump that up to the 80% or higher that was necessary for the atomic bomb.  And it was largely staffed by women.  Kiernan has interviewed a number of the surviving women, here in the 21st century, and done a fair amount of research to give the context, and the result is an interesting but curiously vague book.  For much of it she alternates between telling the story of the various women and giving shorter chapters over to the larger story of the bomb, and it is those short chapters that have specific detail.  The chapters on the women tend to be broad and diffuse, without much in the way of pull-through for the reader to follow, but engagingly told.  These are interesting stories and I'll probably use some of them next time I teach my atomic bomb class, but often maddeningly undefined.

Mostly Void, Partially Stars, and The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (Welcome to Night Vale, Episodes, Volumes 1 and 2)  (Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor)

If you haven’t discovered Welcome to Night Vale, you should correct this as soon as possible.  It’s a podcast about a town out in the desert wasteland somewhere in America, where all of the conspiracy theories are true and accepted as part of everyday life.  It’s presented as a radio broadcast from the town’s only station, and therefore everything gets filtered through Cecil, the host.  Imagine A Prairie Home Companion as written by HP Lovecraft, and you’re about on target.  I’ve finally conceded that I will likely never catch up to the actual podcasts – they’ve got more than a hundred episodes now, and I’m somewhere around episode 38 or 39 – but this is the next best thing: a collection of the episodes written out as narratives, with each one introduced either by one of the creators or one of the voice actors.  It’s all here – the Glow Cloud that drops dead animals on the town and eventually runs for a position on the school board.  The Sheriff’s Secret Police.  The Dog Park, which no citizen of Night Vale is allowed to enter, or even know about.  The hooded figures who should not be paid attention to.  The cat that floats four feet in the air in the men’s room of the station, a station run by an eldritch horror in an office too big for the building to actually hold.  The small civilization beneath the bowling alley that declares war on Night Vale.  The Faceless Old Women Who Secretly Lives In Your House and is running for mayor against Hiram McDaniels, who is a five-headed dragon wanted for insurance fraud.  And of course Carlos, beautiful perfect Carlos, the love of Cecil’s life.  The writing is funny and dark, eminently quotable, and thoroughly addictive.  If you like black comedy, this is pure gold.

American Gods (Neil Gaiman)

Shadow is about to be released from prison, and his only goal is to go back to his wife Laura and live a quiet, trouble-free life.  But Laura is killed in a car accident and on the way back home Shadow meets Mr. Wednesday, who draws him into a final battle between the old gods – brought to America by immigrants and mostly spirits – and the new ones, born here and mostly based on technology.  From this premise comes a long meditation on humanity, spirituality, and modern America that will take Shadow from Wisconsin to Chattanooga and beyond, testing him in ways he never thought he could be tested.  While this is not the first of his books that you should read if you are new to him, Gaiman is a phenomenal writer and he pulls off this complex story with verve.  And if you think his description of the House on the Rock is exaggerated, you simply haven’t been there.

Anansi Boys (Neil Gaiman)

This is in some sense the companion volume to American Gods, following the story of Anansi (Mr. Nancy) and his children.  Fat Charlie Nancy – who hasn’t been fat since he was a child, but is such a charter member of life’s losers that everyone still calls him that – works as an accountant for the Graham Coats Agency.  He has a fiancee named Rosie, whose mother hates him.  And very early in the book his father dies.  Since his father was a god, this is more complicated than it seems, and it leads him to discover a long-lost brother named Spider – far cooler and more sociable than himself – and cross paths with a police detective named Daisy.  Eventually this will become by turns a comedy of mistaken identity, a murder mystery, and an exploration of the nature of gods in the world, all written with Gaiman’s trademark brio. 

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari)

I have long had a soft spot for these kinds of big, synthetic histories that weave together seemingly disparate strands into an overarching argument.  This is a book that would work well with David Christian’s Maps of Time, for example.  Harari tries to tell the entire history of our species – which, for convenience, he abbreviates as Sapiens, to distinguish it from other human species – from its evolutionary origins down to its future in just over 400pp.  Throughout the book he does a really good job of illuminating odd connections and making fascinating arguments that at first seem at odd angles to most of what people take for granted.  He is unimpressed with the Agricultural Revolution, for example, calling it history’s greatest fraud because while it did lead to more food it also led to more misery.  His chapters on the interplay between science, empire, and capitalism were masterful.  Sometimes he slips – his close reading of the Declaration of Independence was so far off base that I actually checked his bio to make sure he was a professional historian, and he has an entire chapter on how to measure happiness that doesn’t really fit into the narrative and doesn’t cite Martin Seligman, one of the pioneers of that field of study – but overall the book works well.  He spends a great deal of time on the notion of imagined communities – things that draw people together without any particular hard reality to them beyond shared belief, such as money, nationalism, or religion (it’s very clear Harari is not an American from the brutally casual way he dismisses all notion of the supernatural as anything other than imaginary).  The book is very well written though it reads like a transcription of a lecture rather than a book – it has the rhythms of spoken language rather than written language.  And it was clearly printed on paper made from depleted uranium and grief, as it weighed far more than you’d think just looking at it.  I enjoyed handing it to people just to see their reaction as their arms were pulled earthward, but that’s me.

The Massive: Black Pacific (Vol. 1) (Brian Wood, Kristian Donaldson, Garry Brown, Dave Stewart)

This was part of a Humble Bundle collection I bought a couple of years back, an assortment of post-apocalyptic fiction that more and more seems like it’s coming true these days.  It’s a graphic novel, which are mostly lost on me – I’m the sort of person who reads the words and barely glances at the artwork.  But it was interesting.  Not long after human civilization is thoroughly disrupted by a series of environmental cataclysms, a former mercenary named Cal Israel plies the seas in the Kapital with his fellow radical pacifist environmentalists.  Although some are more pacifist than others.  They explore the new, more brutal reality.  They seek supplies.  And they search for the Massive, the other ship this group owns that had gone missing at the start of the troubles.  It’s an interesting collection and, like most graphic novels, it flies by.

That Old Cape Magic (Richard Russo) 

This wasn’t the book I had planned to read next, but for a very specific if trivial reason I needed to have a hard-back book that day so this is the one I picked up.  And as with all Richard Russo books, it was well worth it.  In some senses it’s a pretty typical Russo book – warm, gentle, melancholy, thoughtful, full of well-realized and vaguely worn down characters trying their best to get through the day – but it has a different structure from most of the others of his that I’ve read.  Jack Griffin (almost always referred to by his last name, to the point where I had to go back to see if it actually was his first name or not) is in his 50s.  He has a wife (Joy) whom he loves, a daughter (Laura) on her own as a young adult, two parents who are the epitome of academic snobbery and sniping, two in-laws who he doesn’t like, and a former writing partner (Tommy) who keeps entering his life in odd ways.  Griffin was once a screenwriter in LA, but upon the urging of Joy he becomes a minor academic on the east coast at the same college where Joy works in administration, a life that leaves him somewhat empty if he is honest but which Joy finds the fulfillment of her dreams.  And it all slowly falls apart.  The book has two halves, both centered on weddings a year apart and both on Cape Cod, where Griffin’s parents would take him as a child.  Amid the events of the weddings are flashbacks – to Griffin’s childhood, to writing with Tommy, to any number of things that go into building a half-made life.  Griffin is self-aware enough to know what’s going on and clueless enough to let it happen anyway, though Russo does give him something at the end.

Lock In (John Scalzi)

On his first day on the job, FBI Agent Chris Shane and his senior partner, Agent Leslie Vann, are assigned to what looks like a murder.  But this is not the world of today – it’s sometime in the near future, after a devastating epidemic known as Haden’s Syndrome has killed over 400 million people and left a small percentage of its victims alive but “locked in,” unable to control their own bodies in any way despite being entirely conscious and otherwise mentally unaffected.  These people are often known simply as Hadens, and a massive “moon-shot” style federal effort has led to the development of neural networks capable of controlling robots called “threeps” (think Star Wars).  Other Haden victims remain in control of their bodies but develop the ability to Integrate – to allow, with the right technology, locked in Hadens to use their bodies as threeps.  Shane is a Haden.  Vann, it turns out, was once an Integrator.  And the murder in question is going to get tied up inextricably with the money end of Haden’s Syndrome – the market for threeps, the politics of the impending cut in federal support for Haden victims, and the cut throat maneuverings that happen when ruthless people sense opportunities.  This is a pretty typical Scalzi work, even if slightly askew in genre – well written, engaging, and in general an enjoyable if undemanding read.  It’s a sci-fi police procedural whose plot draws you in and hums right along, a page-turner that you can enjoy thoroughly and then put back down.  I heard Scalzi read a bit from the sequel to this (due date: sometime) and he was kind enough to autograph it for me so I was happy.

Welcome to Night Vale (Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor)

Night Vale remains as dark and ridiculous as ever, and that is a good thing.  Fink and Cranor know how to turn a phrase and they’ve created a world where reality as we know it is off-kilter by several degrees.  The townsfolk know this, but soldier on anyway.  Diane works in an office, though at a desk separated from her colleagues by enough distance that she rarely socializes with them.  She doesn’t know what the office really does beyond her job.  Most of her focus is on her son Josh, who is a shapeshifter and a teenager and it isn’t clear which one is harder to work with for her.  When one of her coworkers goes missing, nobody but Diane can even remember that he existed.  Meanwhile Jackie is 19 – has been for decades now – and runs the pawn shop in town.  She has a mother and a childhood that she cannot remember.  Jackie and Diane’s paths will cross when both end up with mysterious pieces of paper stuck to them – papers that say, “King City.”  But they cannot get to King City no matter how hard they try – it is physically impossible, until they find the time-travelling possibilities of the plastic flamingoes.  Trust me, it sort of makes sense when you’re reading it.  Eventually the whole thing turns into a Lovecraftian meditation on identity, which is a remarkable feat.  On the whole I preferred the episode books to this novel, but it was still fun to read.

The Atrocity Archives (Charles Stross)

I recently picked up one of the later volumes in this series – which, once again, I think should have been called the Laundry Cycle rather than the Laundry Files – and I remembered that these books really do require a good memory of what came before in order to make sense.  Having lost that memory, I decided to reread the previous books until I got to the new one, and this is where it all started.  Bob Howard works for the Laundry – an agency within the British government that is so far beyond Top Secret that even knowing about some of the things they do is a crime.  The Laundry protects the realm from the Lovecraftian horrors that inhabit the infinite parallel universes that surround us, universes that are accessible through higher math.  Bob was conscripted into the Laundry when his graduate work came perilously close to destroying Wolverhampton, and at the beginning of the novel he works as one of the IT clerks.  The Laundry is also a bureaucratic agency, with all of the infighting and senseless paperwork of such things.  And the contrast between the bureaucracy and the work of the Laundry is where much of the humor comes from.  Stross is a talented writer with a gift for a phrase and it’s all on display here as Bob finds himself working upward toward being an active duty agent even as his manager tries to sabotage him for her own bureaucratic purposes.  Eventually he finds his way to a) California, where he meets Mo, who will play a much larger role as the series progresses, b) Angleton, his new boss who is quite possibly the most frightening thing in the Laundry, and c) a parallel universe where the best possible option is leftover Nazi occultists and the worst is, well, much worse.  Stross also appends a novella (The Concrete Jungle) about basilisk software in Milton Keynes and the abuses to which it can be put, as well as a short essay analyzing the intersections of spy fiction, horror fiction, and the literary hacker as an avatar of Loki.  All told, well worth the read.

The Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross)

It’s a couple of years later, and Bob and Mo are keeping house now, still working for the Laundry and going through one of those rocky periods that couples go through.  Rather than have time for a vacation, though, Mo gets called up to a Laundry facility for training – she is perhaps the only combat violinist with occult training in the world – while Bob gets sent on a mission to the Caribbean.  A maniacal billionaire is attempting to raise a powerful artifact from the bottom of the sea, in direct violation of the treaty with the Old Ones who live there – a violation which could have dire consequences of the Old Ones get angry about it.  Bob – and Ramona, with whom he is entangled – have to stop this.  There is international bureaucratic rivalry, internal bureaucratic rivalry, and no small amount of James Bond trivia (the engine of the plot is a Bond geas that forces everyone to act according to the archetypes of the movies).  It’s a better story than I remembered it being, but still not as good as The Atrocity Archives.  Appended to it are a short story entitled Plimpf, wherein Bob has to go into a video game to save his intern, and a quasi-non-fictional meditation on twentieth-century spycraft, spy novels, and politics.

Down on the Farm (Charles Stross)

In this short story, Bob Howard goes to the Funny Farm – the mental institution where the Laundry stashes those agents whose minds are casualties of the job.  And, of course, all is not as it seems.  This story introduces Krantzberg Syndrome, which becomes important later on.

Overtime (Charles Stross)

Because Bob was hospitalized when it was time to pick his holiday leave he ends up working over Christmas as the Night Duty Officer – normally a quiet way to pass time, but when Forecasting Ops kills the mood at the Laundry Christmas party by announcing that they will all be no more by next Christmas, the job gets more complicated and dangerous than usual.  Another short story, rather than a novel.

Equoid (Charles Stross)

The third of the Laundry short stories fits more or less at this point in the Laundry timeline, though it was written somewhat later.  Bob is sent out to investigate reports of strange equine happenings in the English countryside.  It turns out that unicorns are not the cuddly cute things of modern cartoons - they're part of the breeding cycle of a creature that exists in two very different (and equally horrifying) genders that need to snap together to mate properly, and which need virgin girls to do it.  Bob - a Londoner to his bones - is not at all happy to be sent out into the countryside among the squirearchy, and he is even less happy when things escalate to a full-blown Plumbing job.  It's a short novella, but one that fits neatly into the narrative arc and allows Stross to continue ratcheting up the stakes for the Laundry.

The Fuller Memorandum (Charles Stross)

This is where the Laundry Files really start to get dark, which is saying something for a series that focuses on the efforts of the British Civil Service to protect our universe from the Lovecraftian horrors that want to eat our souls.  It starts with a rather grim preface outlining the current state of Bob Howard's life, most notably how he wishes he could go back to his "standard British atheism" but he knows better.  The One True Religion is real and so much more horrifying than any of the fairy tales that pass for faith among humanity, and there is nothing he can do with this knowledge but live with it.  At the beginning of the novel Bob goes on a short mission that goes terribly wrong while Mo goes on a longer mission that goes right but whose consequences are equally terrible, and for much of the middle of the novel they deal with the consequences of that.  But those consequences get caught up in the story of the Eater of Souls, a coldly intelligent entity that existed in a WWI-era Russian partisan before being transferred to a body much closer to home.  Eventually there is a cult and a summoning and an uprising of the living dead, and it ends on a rather bleak note, just in time for the next story.  You have to read these things fairly close together, I have found, as otherwise you lose track of the inside references.

The Apocalypse Codex (Charles Stross)

Bob Howard is moving up in the world, though as usual with the Laundry this comes at some personal cost.  In this volume, Bob finds himself assigned to External Assets, a branch of the Laundry that is so deeply covert that even most of the Laundry is unaware that it exists.  In this case, he is assigned by a higher-up named Lockhart to observe and manage a pair of agents - Persephone Hazard (also known as the Duchess) and Johnny McTavish - whose relationship to the Laundry is curiously and rather deliberately left broadly undefined until well into the book when Persephone exasperatedly clues Bob in.  She also gives him the capsule history of Mahogany Row, which for the first time becomes a defined entity rather than a nameless offscreen foil.  Bob and his agents are sent to the US to monitor what at first appears to be one of those bog-standard fundamentalist megachurches that infest this country like lice but which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a much darker cog in the wheel that will ultimately turn toward CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.  With this book the larger overall arc of Bob's story becomes more clear - something I missed when I read these books separately over a period of years.  On to the next

The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross)

Bob Howard continues to climb the Laundry ladder and has become a rather fast-tracked manager with some powers that he didn't have earlier, much to his dismay.  It's a couple of months after the events of The Apocalypse Codex, and all is not well.  He and Mo are having the kind of marital struggles that come with two people having highly stressful occult jobs that often involve killing people (or killing Lovecraftian horrors, which are marginally easier on the conscience but no less draining in practice).  His managers at the Laundry have fallen for the latest make-work management fad and ordered everyone to come up with a side project on their own, though without allocating much in the way of time or money for these projects.  And now there are vampires, one of whom is Bob's psycho ex-girlfriend Mhari, now a decade removed from his life and her Laundry job and working as an investment banker in London.  But "everyone knows there's no such things as vampires," and getting around what everyone knows to arrive at the truth of things is a tall order, one that will take a fearsome toll on the Laundry in general and Bob in particular.  Also, he adopts a stray cat.  Stross continues to spin a fascinating story with some marvelous writing (including one priceless simile that I can only wish I would find an appropriate audience for).

The Annihilation Score (Charles Stross)

This book is where Stross finally faced the issue of how to tell a Laundry story that wasn’t narrated by Bob.  For this story the focus shifts to Mo – Dr. Dominique O’Brien, otherwise known as Agent CANDID or, more prosaically, Bob’s wife – though her voice is fairly similar to his.  The story picks up immediately after the events of The Rhesus Chart – in fact, the first chapter is just the last chapter of The Rhesus Chart told from Mo’s perspective rather than Bob's, which is a bit of a jarring transition if you’re reading them back to back.  In the background is the story of Bob and Mo, whose marriage is beginning to crumble under the occult weight of their jobs and their roles as the apprentice Eater of Souls and the caretaker and wielder of Lector (an accursed violin) respectively.  The foreground gets more complicated.  The arrival of the initial stages of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN has led to a surge of people with odd occult powers – superpowers, as most people think of them – and Mo is farmed out to a new agency designed to be the public face of the British governments attempts to deal with this.  There are the bureaucratic struggles of getting a brand new agency up and running in the face of politics as usual, the occult struggles of piecing together the various malevolent entities from the multiverse that want to wreak havoc, and the personal struggles Mo faces running an agency whose primary staff is composed of 1) Bob’s formerly psycho ex, Mhari, now a prickly but more or less collegial vampire working for the Laundry, 2) Ramona, the Deep One that Bob was entangled with in The Jennifer Morgue, and 3) Jim, who slowly becomes Mo’s romantic interest over the course of the novel now that Mo and Bob are living apart.  There are outbreaks to resolve and a supervillain named Dr. Freudstein to combat and it all ends at the Proms (which, for the first time, I now know what they are).  In between the Auditors become human-scale characters for the first time (one Auditor whose role is merely glancing here was a fairly major character in an earlier book, it turns out), Mo forges working relationships with Mhari and Ramona, and Lector becomes a character in his own right rather than just a weapon.  The pieces are falling into place, and the series gathers for its end run.

The Nightmare Stacks (Charles Stross)

While The Fuller Memorandum was dark, this is where the Laundry Files gets truly grim.  The Cold War got hot, the invasion has begun, and CASE NIGHTMARE RED (rather than GREEN) is the order of the day.  In keeping with The Annihilation Score, the narrator here is not Bob Howard but instead is Alex Schwartz, one of the vampires (“PHANGs” in the parlance of the Laundry, though what that acronym actually stands for is something of a running joke since it changes every time) who came into the Laundry during The Rhesus Chart, and for much of this book the main characters are Alex and Pete (the vicar whom Bob ended up accidentally drafting into the Laundry during The Apocalypse Codex.  Bob is a big muckmuck in the Laundry now – referred to nervously by Alex as Mr. Howard – and neither he nor Mo make any real appearance here, though Pinky and Brains become more fleshed out characters instead of just comic relief.  Bad things are happening in Leeds, and not all of them are because that’s where Alex’s worried and mildly dysfunctional family lives.  What starts out as a brief make-work assignment turns into a full-fledged war as an alien hominid species – the People, or as they have entered into human legend, elves (Stross seems to share Terry Pratchett’s distaste for elves) – flee across the dimensions to try to take over the earth.  Agent First of Spies and Liars is sent across to prepare the way and takes over the body of an innocent – Cassie – whose fate is grimly recorded later.  The new Cassie and Alex bond, however, so when the elves and the British clash, they end up on the same side.  Stross does a good job of demonstrating the cross-cultural confusions that sabotage military plans (the All-Highest’s plans for conquering humankind rely on a vision of society no human would recognize), and he is also very good at depicting unfolding catastrophes – his buildup to the final battle is both precise and illuminating as it jumps from POV to POV.  This is easily the bloodiest and tensest book in the series thus far.  What started out as satire and comedy has come around to war and tragedy, and there are still books to go before the Laundry Files are closed.

Books Read in 2017, Part 1

For as long as I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve kept track of the books I’ve read.  I’m not sure why, other than the fact that it’s my blog and I enjoy keeping track of those books and remembering them here.  It’s as good a reason as any.

This year often felt a bit out of sync, as the collapse of the American republic under the assault of right-wing extremism draws ever closer, and that often made it hard to focus on reading for pleasure.  But you need something in this world just for your own – preferably a few somethings – and so we press on.

This is the list for 2017.  Enjoy!

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A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (James Shapiro)

One of the things that has long driven me buggy about English literature scholarship is the insistence that texts stand on their own, outside of their historical context, and can be analyzed purely as words on the page.  This nonsense reached its peak with the literary theorists of the 1990s, a bizarre tribe of jargon-spewing obscurantists whose work infected even the discipline of history while I was in graduate school.  James Shapiro is not one of those.  He firmly situates Shakespeare in the context of his times, and by keeping a tight focus on one pivotal year he brings to the surface the connections between Shakespeare’s life, his plays, and the larger events of English history.  Queen Elizabeth I, the Earl of Essex, and Ben Johnson all loom large here, for example, and Shapiro does a masterful job of presenting Shakespeare as a working writer of his time, shaped by and shaping the events that surrounded him, trying to make a living in an age of high uncertainty.  As Shapiro notes, “Shakespeare didn’t write ‘as if from another planet,’ as Coleridge put it: he wrote for the Globe.”

F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers (Richard Benson)

This is a fairly slim collection of the sorts of things that simultaneously make teachers laugh out loud and bang their heads against the wall in frustration, most of which I had not seen before though there were a few golden oldies.  They’re organized by subject, and if you’re looking for a quick and cheerful book, this is a good one to zip through.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (Erik Larson)

When I was a kid I would go to the reading room at my local library – a tiny little place – and read whatever interested me.  One book that I must have read a dozen times or more was a thin collection of stories of shipwrecks, mostly modern.  I knew more about the sad fate of the Andrea Doria than any 10-year-old boy really ought to have known.  So when a friend gave me this book as a birthday present, I was eager to read it.  Larson is a captivating writer – it’s amazing how much good history these days is being written by people who aren’t professional historians – who has done a vast amount of research and produced a book that is both well documented and compellingly readable.  It follows the standard 1970s disaster movie arc – you meet the various characters who will feature in the story and get to know them a bit, you follow the events until the disaster hits, the disaster is described in some detail, and then you follow the characters through to the aftermath.  But Larson does such a good job with the cast of characters – a wide assortment ranging from the passengers and crew of the Lusitania to the captain of the U20 that sank her to British intelligence to the White House and beyond – and such a good job of building suspense that you get swept along in the story and find yourself genuinely fascinated with the people he writes about and the things that happen to them.  Whenever I read about historical tragedies I always find myself hoping that things will turn out differently this time, but they don’t and that’s why it’s history, I suppose.  If you don’t know how it ends already, it’s really not history yet.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (JD Vance)

Much has been made of late of the working class white male, particularly those in the broad areas of Appalachia and the Rust Belt.  He is credited with the victory of the current lawless regime in Washington, the revival of a peculiar sort of right-wing petit-Fascist populism, and the popularity of a distinctive sort of low-brow entertainment best exemplified by reality television, particularly involving Confederate flags and/or dimwitted half-clothed 20-somethings.  He has also been vilified as unemployable, drug-addicted, close-minded, and generally unsavory.  And while all of these things are true in some measure, they don’t tell the whole story.  JD Vance’s book doesn’t tell the whole story either, but it does provide a window into the values and troubles of such people – “hillbillies” in Vance’s own word.  Vance comes from this subculture – he was born poor in Middletown, Ohio, to parents who fled the poverty of rural Kentucky but never really escaped it or the culture that came with it.  That Vance would ultimately go to Yale Law School and become part of the elite he envied and hated as a child is a complicated story, and it makes him somewhat bilingual in the sense of being able to translate hillbilly culture for a wider audience.  He tells his own story with sympathy and a critical eye, explaining the values of his people, justifying them where he thinks it appropriate (loyalty is a key virtue, after all) and criticizing them as well (he never uses the phrase “crab bucket,” but he might as well have).  If you want to understand the political and cultural dysfunctionality of the 21st-century US, this is a decent place to start, though it was not without its flaws.  I can’t say that I liked this book, on balance – having much sympathy for people whose actions often seem deliberately calculated to make my own children’s lives poorer doesn't come easily, so sue me – but it was useful.

All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

Marie-Laure lives in Paris in 1940.  Her father is the locksmith for a museum there.  She has been blind since she was a child.  Werner lives with his sister Jutta in a German orphanage, where he becomes fascinated by radio, particularly a recorded French voice that gives science lessons late at night.  Soon they will be swept into the war – Marie-Laure and her father to Saint-Malo on the Breton coast, Werner into the Wehrmacht.  Eventually their stories will collide at the Allied destruction of Saint-Malo in August 1944.  This is a crystalline novel, at once sad and lovely, in which terrible things happen.  Doerr does not save his characters from the world around them but lets those that live through it emerge scarred at the other end.  The story is told in the present tense, though it bounces around in time – it begins with the bombing, and then flashes back to the childhoods of the main characters, back and forth, back and forth as the stories converge (it’s not much of a spoiler to note that the French scientist was Marie-Laure’s grandfather, who died in WWI), and then concludes with two short epilogues – one set in 1974 and another in 2014.  It’s a haunting story that will stay with you, though I admit that reading a book about the Fascist takeover of a once-proud democracy was probably not the best thing for my mental health immediately after the inauguration of der Sturmtrumper.  I was, however, happy to recognize an anecdote that Doerr lifted wholesale from Richard Feynman’s autobiography and gave to Werner, and even happier when he gave Feynman credit for it in the Acknowledgements.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (Bill Bryson)

I first heard this as an audiobook, but those are never quite real to me and I’ve long wanted to read it in print.  When a local bookstore had an “Everything In The Store Costs $1” sale and this was there, I picked it up.  And I was richly rewarded for doing so.  Bryson grew up in Iowa in the 1950s and early 1960s – the height of the American Century, and a time now hallowed by many Americans as the greatest time to be an American.  Bryson occasionally points out that this was mostly true for straight white men, but he’s usually content to focus on his own small life.  His family was uneventfully happy – both parents worked for the Des Moines Register and were loving if somewhat odd – and his childhood was both sheltered and mischievous.  Bryson manages to combine a curmudgeonly grouchiness and a genuine appreciation for what he had in prose that spans from laugh-out-loud funny to heartwarming, often at his own expense though sometimes at that of his friends.  It’s a pleasant and undemanding book, which in early 2017 made for a very nice break from reality.

I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long: Field Trip Fiascos and Expedition Disasters (Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Wendy Logsdon, eds)

This book could well have been subtitled “White People Uncomfortable in Third World Countries.”  It is, as advertised, a collection of stories from researchers doing biological or anthropological field work in poor, remote, and often hostile areas, most of which are centered on the things that go wrong on such expeditions though occasionally you do get stories of things going unexpectedly well.  It was an interesting book rather than a humorous one – there are very few things in here that are actually funny, despite the claims of the reviewers, but the stories are good at holding your attention and at reminding me why I am not likely to go adventure touring anytime soon.

C’est la Vie: An American Conquers the City of Light, Begins a New Life, and Becomes – Zut Alors! – Almost French (Suzy Gershman)

On the one hand, you have to feel a bit for Suzy Gershman.  Her beloved husband dies at the very beginning of the book, leaving her to achieve their dream of moving to Paris on her own.  She faces all of the usual indignities of the expat – finding a place to live, settling into a new culture, and so on – and in the end she seems to find happiness there.  On the other hand, to judge from her writing, she is so cluelessly privileged that most of the time you’re reading this you just want to slap her with a wet fish and tell her to stop being so insufferable.  She lives to shop, and in fact writes a series of books entitled Born to Shop, so you know going in that she’s going to be fairly shallow and materialistic.  She is the sort of person who will reject a perfect apartment, large, secure, airy, light, and one that most people could never get within hailing distance of affording, because the neighborhood is insufficiently cute.  She spends most of the book having an affair with a married man, which she regards as a very French thing to do and perhaps it is, though it involves more information than was probably necessary even if she does give the poor man a pseudonym.  She attends all the best parties, hobnobs with the in crowd, is forever calling limos or flying back and forth to the US, and devotes immense space to things like dishes, furniture, and restaurant meals.  She’s a good writer and can be very engaging when she wants to be, but at bottom this is the story of an extraordinarily privileged person who really doesn’t seem to be aware of just how privileged she is – a relic of an era when you could air a television show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous without irony – and that does wear thin after a while. 

One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko (Mike Royko)

Mike Royko wrote a 5x/week column for various Chicago newspapers for more than thirty years, from the early 1960s through his death in the mid-1990s.  By the 1980s he was syndicated, which is how I found him in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  He was always a must-read – biting, funny, bittersweet, often angry at the injustices of the world visited on the powerless, and always well written.  This is basically a “greatest hits” collection, as determined by his wife and a few colleagues not long after his death, and they’re all good ones – especially if you remember the history going on around them.  He loved Chicago and lived and died by the Cubs.  He hated bureaucrats, mindless attempts to legislate morality or politeness, and flying.  This was an era when a newspaper column was a powerful thing, and he used it well.  There is no real equivalent in the digital age, and that’s a shame.

Empire Falls (Richard Russo)

Richard Russo writes big, warm-hearted books that can often be very funny (such as Straight Man) but are more often gently sad (Bridge of Sighs).  This one has flashes of humor but is mostly a story of a dying small town in central Maine and the lives of some of the people caught there, and so tends toward the latter more than the former.  The Whiting family ran the textile mills that made Empire Falls prosperous, but those mills closed long ago and left Francine Whiting as the matriarch of the town, pulling the strings and making those in her service jump according to her wishes.  Miles Roby runs the Empire Grill, having left college to be with his dying mother and never quite escaping again.  He has a teenaged daughter named Christina whom everyone calls Tick, a soon-to-be-ex wife named Janine, a reprobate father named Max, and a small but well-realized group of friends.  The story follows Miles’ personal life, Tick’s disastrous high school experiences, the ups and downs of the Empire Grill, and the small, often unrealized dreams and victories of everyday life in a declining town.  Other than the ending, which felt both abrupt and a bit out of place, it’s a compelling and well written story of people living their lives and trying to do the best they can, whether that’s actually good enough or not.

The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner, and Other Stories (Terry Pratchett)

Of the ongoing struggle to cash in on the papers and early works of famous and recently deceased authors there is no end.  On the one hand, it is a bit exploitative.  On the other hand, it gives those of us who would like one more visit with the author a chance to have it.  This is a sequel of sorts to the earlier Dragons at Crumbling Castle and like that volume it is a collection of early stories that Pratchett wrote as a newspaper columnist.  They’re whimsical, entertaining, and clearly aimed at tweens – a term Pratchett probably would have hated, even if it was a demographic he seems to have adored.  They’ve been lightly edited by Pratchett himself, which suggests that he was planning to publish these collections anyway before he died, and they are full of the kind of typographical tricks that keep kids entertained.  Lightweight, but fun.

The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones (Sandra Tsing Loh)

Sandra Tsing Loh does a fine job of screwing up her own life and then writing an interesting book about it, and if there are times when you want to grab her by the collar and tell her to stop being such an idiot, there are also times when you want to give her a hug and tell her it will all be okay.  She starts the book in her late 40s, simultaneously about to go into menopause and embark on a disastrous affair with her manager.  It’s hard to tell which one is more destructive, as she ends up divorced and hormonally scattered throughout the book.  Her daughters suffer, her career suffers, she suffers, her new boyfriend suffers.  One imagines her ex-husband suffers too, though he is shunted safely offstage for much of the book.  She is an engaging writer and most of the time this is enough to make up for the things she writes about – she is both incredibly self-indulgent and often self-deprecating – but not always and not quite enough to make me want to spend any more time with her.  But then, I am not the target audience of this book.

That’s Not English: Britishisms, Americanisms, and What Our English Says About Us (Erin Moore)

I’ve always loved learning about the cultural and linguistic differences between the US and Britain, and this book is right up that alley.  It’s a short, breezy take on the old saw that the US and Britain are separated by a common language (something she explicitly references, even if it is to downplay how common that language really is).  It’s organized by word, with each chapter devoted to a single word (“Quite” or “Scrappy” or somesuch) in which both the various meanings of that word and the cultural assumptions and practices behind those meanings are examined.  In American English, for example, “quite” means “very” – when an American says, “That’s quite good” she means that it is a bit better than good.  In British English, however, “quite” means “not really” or “kind of” – when an Englishman says “That’s quite good” he means that it’s not really up to par.  From there Moore spins out the general enthusiasm and optimism of American culture versus the restraint and sarcasm of British culture.  An American expat living in London, Moore has a good feel for these differences and a certain sympathy for both sides, and the book manages to be both entertaining and educational.

The Ralph Glasser Omnibus (Ralph Glasser)

Growing Up In the Gorbals

Ralph Glasser was an economist and a psychologist who became an advisor to a number of developing countries in his later life, notably as a defender of traditional communities under threat from “progress,” but he grew up in the Gorbals – the notoriously poor slums of Glasgow.  This is the first volume of his autobiography (collected in the Omnibus), and it covers his childhood and young adulthood, ending just as he sets off for a bizarrely improbable undergraduate career at Oxford University.  Glasser and most of his neighbors were either the descendants of East European Jews or were themselves the immigrants who came to the UK in the early 20th century, and the life he led was one of desperate poverty within a functioning if rather sharp-edged community.  His mother died when he was young, his father was a gambling addict, and his sisters were sufficiently older than he as to provide very little company, so he relied on his friends, schoolmates, and – when he was forced to leave school at 14 – his workmates at a textile factory, where he worked as a presser.  He describes the impact of poverty on both himself and his community, drawing portraits of those who struggled against it and those who fell.  The lot of women in the Gorbals was particularly grim.  As the book moves on it gets more reflective and less action-oriented, and you lose track of the forward motion of time as he skims back and forth across events.  But he was always a reader, and when an essay sent off without much hope of success wins him a place at Oxford it changes both his future and his entire relationship with his own community.  It’s an elegantly written life, hazy on some details and sharp on others.  His descriptions of union life, Communist agitations, sexual relations, and the scrabble to find food and the basics of life are captivating.

Gorbals Boy at Oxford 

Picking up pretty much exactly where the previous volume left off, Glasser now finds himself at Oxford in the waning days of the Depression as WWII steams ever closer.  Much of the book concerns three themes.  First, there is the fish out of water story, as the poor Scottish slum-dweller tries to fit himself into the elite English society of Oxford, with often mixed results.  He is patronized.  He wrong-foots himself continually.  He makes a few friends and eventually learns the code, though he agonizes over whether he should conform to it.  This is especially true with his relationships, all of which go wrong in grimly predictable ways.  He does try to visit his family and friends in the Gorbals at one point, but finds himself a stranger, so perhaps his transformation succeeds.  Second, there is the political story of a man flirting around the edges of Communism at a time when that was a respectable thing to do.  He meets with Party mandarins, recruiters, and workers.  He dwells forever on the plight of the worker and more so on the condescending and often uninformed sentiment of the Oxford elites toward those workers, even when that sentiment is ostensibly sympathetic.  His Gorbals friend Bernard figures heavily into this, as a mentor and a protector in some ways.  Third, there is the wartime story, as WWII intrudes into the bubble of Oxford and spirits Glasser away for an indeterminate amount of time before dropping him back there, older and sadder but not all that much wiser.  By the end of the book Glasser is acclimated to his new surroundings – he doesn’t worry so much about money, he has a new job with the “boss class” in an office, and his anxiety, while ever present, is less obsessive.  Few people end up happy in this book, least of all Glasser, and it is a curiously vague book when it comes to things like dates and context, though very specific about emotions and inner turmoil.

Gorbals Voice, Siren Songs

There is a certain timeless quality to Glasser’s memoirs, even beyond the fact that he never, to my recollection, mentions a single date anywhere in this collection (it is only from the back cover blurb that I could get any real handle on when he arrived at Oxford in the previous volume, for example).  This timelessness is more to do with the fact that this isn’t a memoir of a life so much as it is the memory of a shaping childhood transferred to a new adult life in much different surroundings, both personal and global.  This volume is set after WWII in the bleak and puzzled days following what should have been a glorious victory, and the poor boy from the Gorbals now has an Oxford degree and a government job and runs with a more affluent crowd than ever he thought he would.  This concluding volume is more bittersweet, a story of betwixt and between.  Glasser chews over his failed marriage and another failed relationship, harkening back to similar failures at Oxford and the Gorbals.  He meticulously dissects his Jewishness, casting back to the days of comfortable religious surroundings in the Gorbals and ahead to the spiritually bleached world of British society in a post-Holocaust world.  The old Communist crusades are long gone, and Glasser doesn’t really find anything to replace them with until almost literally the last paragraph of the book.  If you seek action, go elsewhere.  This is a profound meditation of an unexpected life thoroughly scrutinized, one whose victories never seem to make him happier and whose travels from his origins seem to leave him both curiously anchored and somewhat adrift.