Saturday Post, 8/11/2012

                                           "Let me 'splain. No, is too much. Let me sum up..."


Ok. Two weeks of reading. I'll give you the highlights.

Dave Duncan - The Reluctant Swordsman

Wallie Smith enters a hospital here in our world, suffering from something brain related - a tumor? I forget. Anyway, he wakes up in a fantasy world, in the body of a barbarian swordsman. He is expected to do amazing things, because he is a seventh level swordsman - the best of the best. He is approached by a god, or a godlet (perhaps), who tells him that his job is to save the world...

In another author's hands, this book could have been mindless fluff. Duncan, however, does some amazing things here, and offers us a deeply philosophical text on the nature of free will. The pre-literate society that Wallie has found himself in is corrupt from the top down - and the top is the gods. Duncan gives us some delightful relationship parallels: Wallie and the gods (where Wallie is inferior and has no free will [at one point Wallie says something like, "what if I don't want to do what you want me to do?" and the godlet says "but you do want to do what we want you to do." and Wallie says, "yes, I do want to do that."]); Wallie and his apprentice (Wallie is superior due to skill, but the apprentice can be and is elevated to Wallie's level); Wallie and his love interest (she's a slave. Wallie is socially superior, but tells her she isn't a slave anymore. Does she have free will? Ahhhh. Wallie says she does, but she doesn't act as though she does - until she says "no" to Wallie, she is still acting as a slave, even if Wallie treats her nicely. IE, if Wallie wants her to eat dinner with him - elevating her to his social status - and she does it to please him rather than because she legitimately wants to, then she is still acting as a slave, even if she benefits from the exchange.) So, what does free will mean? And how do you save a world which is run by corrupt gods? Alas, unless I find the second and third books in some paperback sale somewhere, I'll never know - this is one of the few drawbacks of using a library.

Wait! A contest suggests itself! I'll make a separate post - watch this space.

John Scalzi - Redshirts

This book opens as a parody of classic Star Trek, shifts into a pastiche, and ultimately grows into it's own thing, a humorous yet deep musing on the nature of humanity, life, death, and (as with Duncan), free will. Unfortunately, I can't really say very much about the book without spoiling the plot twists that are a critical part of what makes the story great.

Here's what I can say. It's about a ship in the Universal Union - the starship Intrepid. Ensigns on board the ship have learned that when they serve on away teams with certain members of the command crew, their chances of survival are statistically very very low. A group of ensigns get together to figure out why, and what they can do about it.

There are some other things I can say about the book. One, I found it delightfully funny; biting in places, but over all a pleasure. However, I like Scalzi's style of dialogue and character description. If you don't, then you might find the book somewhat difficult to read. Two, the best best best part of the book is the short stories that serve as "codas" at the end of the book. There is more heart and character development per paragraph in the short stories than in the novel they are codas of (and there's a lot of heart and character development in the novel) But you can't read the stories without the context of the bigger novel. Still, Mr. Scalzi, in the unlikely instance that you are reading this, write more short stories!*

A last thing. I didn't like the very final twist - it felt a little cheap. Not enough to seriously affect my enjoyment of the novel, but still.

*A note on short stories. Charles DeLint suggested (somewhere, and I'm not going to hunt it down right now) that short stories are actually quite dangerous for authors. They take almost as long to write well as a novel, but they don't pay out nearly as well, and you need to accumulate several before you can actually do anything with them. And yet, sometimes you have no choice but to write them. Thus, DeLint contributes short stories to collections, and periodically he releases a collection of his own short stories - he does this for his own amusement. Still - more short stories! Everywhere!

Alex Bledsoe - The Hum and the Shiver

Speaking of Charles DeLint - this novel is reminiscent of DeLint's work. A truly amazing work of mythic fiction which mixes sweet with bitter, and offers a collection of really strong characters, centered on a powerful female character (which, you know, I love).

Bronwynn Hyatt returns to her tiny Tennessee town from Iraq with a badly injured leg and the adulation of a grateful nation. Hyatt is a hero, but she doesn't remember why - something to do with killing a bunch of Iraqis who were trying to kill her. (The structure of Hyatt's moment of heroism seems modeled on Pvt. Lynch) Anyway, that's not really central to the novel. Hyatt is a Tufa, a member of a secretive people which lives in the hills of the American South, and which is rumored to have certain powers.

The book is about coming home to a place you missed, and learning that you don't fit as well as you thought you might. It's about the duties of family, and about your identity within the family. The plot is a small one - no sweeping narratives about saving the world or foiling a grand scheme to kill the president or anything like that. Bronwynn struggles with herself, and with the petty powers in her local community. She falls in love, perhaps. She learns who she is, and how she fits into her world. And Bledsoe packs so much heart and character into the book that it feels like a much much larger work. Then, he wraps the whole thing up with mountain music so vibrant you can hear it - there's a lot to love about this book.

Trigger warnings, however - there are some scenes of violence that are a little raw; in particular a scene of animal cruelty. Also, there are some strong implications of rape, or at least rape ideation.

Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano: Eruption

Oh my god, this book was so awful! I'm a Turtledove fan, and I'm a fan of disaster novels, and neither of those things outweigh the fact that this was not a good book. How was it bad? Let me count the ways:

1) It's a book about the eruption of the supervolcano which is under Yellowstone National Park (an actual thing, I assure you). The title is pretty clear about that. And yet, for the first quarter of the book, characters wonder if the heroes are right about the possibility of the volcano erupting. That's right - the volcano doesn't erupt until nearly a quarter of the way through the book.
2) All of what happens before the volcano erupts is pretty banal. There are several descriptions of what Colin, one of the heroes, is eating for dinner. Nothing happens!
3) The eruption itself is somewhat anti-climactic. Almost all of the principle characters are well outside the danger zone. The two who are not escape fairly quickly. No long descriptions of devastation - everything is at a remove.
4) Speaking of which - there's a bit, about 3/4 of the way into the book, where Iran launches a nuke at Israel. The rationale is that since the American warheads are largely in the midwest, and since the midwest is covered by a heavy layer of volcanic ash and dead animals, the US can't retaliate in defense of Israel. Fair enough - a bit of a stretch, perhaps, and faulty logic on the part of the Iranians, because the Israeli's have nukes of their own, which they use. The problem is, this all takes place in a couple of paragraphs, is conveyed third-hand (a character watches a report on CNN about the event), and is Never Mentioned Again. A nuclear war. Well, skirmish. In the Middle East. Never mentioned again.
5) Most of what the characters do after the eruption is pretty banal as well. Nothing happens! I guess the point is that human beings basically keep on doing what they were doing - falling in love, getting married, having babies, playing music, taking classes - but the description of the book says this: "Those who survive find themselves caught in an apocalyptic catastrophe in which humanity has no choice but to rise from the ashes and recreate the world..." And there's none of that. There is no apocalyptic catastrophe (food shortages and extreme global cooling are beginning, but they are SLOOOOOW), and there is no rising from the ashes and recreating the world. Perhaps in later books? But I will never find out, because I have no desire to read later books.

There were a few scenes with real impact. There's a plane crash which was solidly well written. I liked the relationship between Colin and Kelly. That's about 50 pages, perhaps - a short story, maybe?

Ok. Those are the high (and low) points. I also read:

Andrew Blum - Tubes: A trip to the center of the Internet - interesting book, as much history as geography. A good way of looking at the infrastructure of the internet. A little dry - I took a break and read Redshirts.

Tanya Huff - The Heart of Valor - third book in the Valor's Confederation series. Good solid book, nice twists and some pleasant character development. A quick read.

Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer - Sorcery and Cecelia: Or the Magic Chocolate Pot - The first of Wrede and Stevermer's epistilary series. I've read them before, but there's a third book in the series that is new, and my wife agreed that we needed to re-read before advancing. This is a fun series; lots of little jokes. Wrede and Stevermer clearly had fun writing it, but the later books are better.

Monday Reviews, so late it's Tuesday, 6/26/2012

I could have written this last night. I should have written this last night. I did not, and so I am writing it now.

Two books completed last week, but one of them was an omnibus, so, technically, three books completed last week.

Stephen Platt - Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom


This is a fairly dense history of what Platt describes as the Taiping Civil War, but what is more traditionally referred to as the Taiping Rebellion. In the early 1850s, Hong Xiuquan began preaching a highly ideosyncratic version of Christianity in southern China, which led to an uprising against the Manchurian  Qing Dynasty which resulted in the Taiping capture of the city of Nanjing, and a decade and a half of civil war in China. Ultimately, the British (and some Americans) intervened on behalf of the Qing Emperor and the Taiping were defeated.

Platt, as an historian, has an interesting thesis. Other historians addressing the Taiping tend to focus on a couple of aspects of the war.  Chinese Communist historians have tended to view the Taiping as early Communist rebels, which, Platt (and others) argue they certainly were not. Many Western historians have focused on the role played by Europeans in the uprising, contending either that the British intervention was definitive in the defeat of the Taiping, or irrelevant. Platt argues that the British intervention was neither definitive nor irrelevant - that it certainly tipped the scales in the favor of the Qing reaction to the Taiping, but that it wasn't the primary reason that the Taiping were defeated.  Platt also contends that the British intervention tells us more about the British in the 1850s and '60s than it does about the Taiping.

The fact that the period is, as I said, generally referred to as a Rebellion is telling - Platt contends (and shows with some authority) that it is better understood as a civil war, and compares it to the US Civil War, which, of course, took place during the same general time period. The Taiping were ultimately defeated in 1864, and the Confederacy were defeated in 1865. The fact that Britain intervened in a Chinese civil war and not in the American civil war is, to Platt, highly significant.

So, reading as an historian, this was a very good book - an new approach to an exciting period in Chinese history, with copious footnotes, and a rigorously defended argument. Students of Chinese history will almost certainly find this on reading lists in the next couple of years, and that is somewhere it deserves to be.

As a reader, Platt was a little dense. The book is only 364 pages long (plus footnotes and an index), but the writing is complex and the pacing is slow. Graduate students will gut this book - a lay reader might find it slow going. I think the book is compelling enough, with strong historical figures and exciting battles (both military and political), that it will hold the attention of an interested non-historian. Still, you're going to want to take your time, I suspect.

I think there are very interesting parallels between the Taiping Civil War and current US military interventions. Platt doesn't directly address the connections, but his broader argument is that outside interference can, at best, prolong the chaos of a civil war. At worst, outsiders can prop up a government which really ought to collapse.

Final thoughts - as I've said of other books, the section of pictures adds almost nothing, and could easily be replaced by several maps, of which there are never enough. I'm coming to believe that this is an endemic failure of historical publications - there are never enough maps, and the pictures are rarely useful. They never show things that I want to see, and tend to break up the flow of the book. I suspect it's a publishing decision rather than a decision by the author.

Tanya Huff - A Confederation of Valor


This is an omnibus of Huff's first two "Valor" books - Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor.  These are pretty solid mil-fic. This provided an interesting contrast to Platt.  Platt was writing military history (military/social history, really), which tends to have a top down approach.  It's easy to research what the Hong Rengan and Zeng Guofan's of the world are doing, much harder to research what the soldiers under their command are up to.  Huff, as is common in military fiction, focuses on the individual soldiers at the bottom of the command structure.  Her heroine, Tarin, is a staff sergeant in the Confederation Marines, the ground troops which (in the distant future, in space) protect the Confederation from the Others. So, space marines.

The common problem with a bottom up focus is that mil fic tends to run into a situation where the grunt is always right and the officer is always wrong. Sometimes this is shown to be a perspective thing - from the soldier's point of view, this is correct, but a bigger picture shows that the officers actually have some idea of what's going on. Often, though, the tone of the book tends to suggest that, once promoted past Lieutenant, all officers take leave of their senses and, for lack of a better word, humanity. Huff walks the line between these two elements - sometimes she dips a little too deeply into the "Army would run better without officers" camp.

Huff has some interesting races involved, but she isn't as good at space aliens as Cherryh is, so there is a "human, but with a tail" feel. Also, she plays with the "most of the Confederation is totally pacifistic, they need the humans to fight their battles, because humans are inherently violent" trope - a trope which I really don't like very much.

All of that aside, I love Huff's characters. These books were a delight to read, because Huff played, quite consciously, with a lot of other military fiction tropes - the "I've only got two months left in service guys!" thing, and the "the nice guy gets killed" thing, among others. Huff is having fun with what she's writing, and that comes through - it's not hard for her readers to have fun with what she has written. Consequently, the books have heart. There are funny bits. There are sad bits. Despite the significant flaws, the books transcend, and are well worth taking a look. Also, look for the author shout-outs to Cory Doctorow and Julie Czerneda (there's a word for this [where the author names a character after someone as an homage], and I can't find it right now - if you know what it is, drop it in the comments). Tuckerization! Thanks, Beth!

Saturday Review, 12/10/2011

4 books this week:

Kevin Mitnick - Ghost in the Wire


Mitnick is a big deal in the computer hacking world. This is something of an autobiography, covering Mitnick's discovery of social controls (con artistry, more or less) and then computers and phone networks in California. In the mid-80s, Mitnick became a desired target of the FBI and such agencies, a situation which did not change into the '90s. Eventually he was arrested and became something of a cause celebre because of the way his rights to sentencing were rather severely bent, because of his scary (and largely false) persona as super-hacker (what Mitnick calls the Mitnick Myth). He is now a consultant, engaging in hacking for companies who want to test their own network security.

My overall reaction to the book is meh. Mitnick wanders through his personal narrative, often noting something to the effect of "while this was going on, this other thing happened," and breaking his narrative flow. Further, I found Mitnick's description of himself to be highly distasteful. Throughout, Mitnick engages in highly anti-social actions - breaking into networks to steal the code for cell phones; tweaking his own cell phone so that his calls were billed to someone else, tricking officials into giving him private information - and doesn't seem to fully get why these things got him in trouble. In his defense, he didn't use the data he stole, or even make money off of it in anyway, but if I break into your house and take pictures of your art collection, I have still engaged in an illegal action. Mitnick comes across as mildly sociopathic and, despite his protestation, doesn't seem to be particularly likable. Had the writing been more entertaining, the content wouldn't have mattered. Had the content been less disagreeable, the writing wouldn't have mattered. Combined, the whole was less than lovely.

Tom Perrotta - The Leftovers


The Rapture has occurred, or something that looks very much like the Rapture - lots and lots of people have disappeared. Only some of them are not the sort of people who the Rapture should affect - non-Christians, and open sinners, and all manner of people. The Sudden Disappearance, although central to the plot, is never explained - which is probably for the best, since that's not really the point of the book. As the title suggests, the book is about the people left behind, left with the painful task of picking up the pieces and figuring out what to do next.

Perrotta's characters do all manner of things next. Some of them join cults which are more or less destructive, depending on the cult, and on the joinee. Some of them throw away their lives on drugs and sex and general hedonism. Some of them become politicians. Some of them lose their faith, and some cheat on their spouses, and some of them remain faithful to something or someone. For the most part, life goes on - and, largely, I think that was Perrotta's point. Peoples is peoples (and frogs are frogs), rapture or no rapture.

So, that's somewhat hopeful, I suppose. Life goes on, and humanity adapts to all manner of oddness. Beyond that, though, the book was somewhat depressing, as you might expect. Billions of people just vanished, and the world has changed. Everyone in the book is damaged and grieving and not sure how to go on, all at once, all at the same time. It makes for very difficult reading at times. I can imagine that it would be extremely difficult reading if you've recently had a death in your close personal circle. Perrotta's writing is excellent, and that makes the book highly readable, even enjoyable in places, but the subject matter, ultimately, remains difficult to digest. Finally, the book just ends - on a hopeful note, with a baby who will probably reknit at least one small family - bang, right in the middle of things. Which is, more or less, where the book starts. This would be an interesting book to have a discussion about, and I imagine that lots of book groups will do that over the next year.

Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves


Caper novel. A bunch of crooks set out to steal money from a money launderer. Things go awry, which is normal for this sort of book, but work themselves out, more or less, in the end. Which is also normal.

The book is a little deeper and twistier than the typical caper novel, asking questions about the nature of humanity, and about growing old, and about the danger of secrets, and the inevitability of betrayal. All around these deeper themes, Spiegelman tells a highly entertaining story about breaking into dark houses and stealing things. There's a lot of technical detail, and a few explosions. In the end, a delightful novel with some fantastic twists (although I had figured out one of the big twists before the end - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as the it makes the reader feel smart rather than the author look stupid, if you follow me) and a highly satisfying ending. Good read, and a nice step down from the Perrotta - deep enough that it stands up against the literature, but not so deep that the two books back to back swamped me.

Tanya Huff - The Wild Ways


A further step away from Perrotta and Spiegelman, this is the sequel to Huff's Enchanted Emporium, both pleasantly interesting paranormal romance. Huff, of course, has been writing paranormal romance since before paranormal romance was a thing - the Blood series, with Victoria Nelson the ex-cop PI and Henry Fitzroy the ancient vampire (and Victoria's lover) present clear precedents for the sub-genre. Huff has had, and continues to have, highly positive effects upon the sub-genre.  In particular, Huff has gone out of her way to include characters of colour and characters with different sexual orientations, even (especially) when those features are not critical to the plot. In this book, the principle character is bisexual (well, ok, Charlotte Gale is more of an opportunistic forager when it comes to sex, but she clearly doesn't discriminate between genders), one of the important secondary characters is black (just because), another pair are gay (and deeply committed to each other). All great stuff.

A little background. The Gale family are not quite human. The women in the family are skilled at casting magic with "charms" - little patterns that cause things to go more smoothly - the car doesn't need repairing as often, the windows open more smoothly, people tend to like you a little more, etc etc - and they like to put these charms in baked goods, especially pies and pancakes. Pies and pancakes feature heavily in the books, almost a running gag. Perhaps exactly a running gag. As the women age, they become Aunties - matriarchs who control the family with carefully hidden iron fists. The Gale Aunties would give Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax a run for their money - or, at least, a fair fight. The men in the Gale family tend to turn into stags when frightened or excited. Especially when excited.

Sex in the Gale family is ... odd. Very open, and highly ritualized, and tightly tightly controlled for the good of the family. And it involves men who turn into stags when they get excited. Huff doesn't really discuss the logistics of that, particularly, but you can tuck it away for consideration, if you like. (That sort of implies that there's a lot of sex in these books, and that would be untrue - it happens, Huff sometimes describes it (not in particular detail), but it's not a central feature of the books.)

In this book, Charlotte (Charlie) Gale heads to Cape Breton to help out a friend with a Celtic rock band. (Did I mention that the books are set in Canada? They are - Canadianism runs deep in the books, which excites me a little - I've actually been to some of the places Huff describes! Whee!) While there, she gets mixed up with a bunch of selkies trying to save their habitat from an oil rig. This is all complicated by the fact that Charlie is a Wild Talent - she can do things that the average Gale girl cannot, like charm people with music, and walk between woods (allowing her to cross distances quickly by playing music to trees, more or less). Further, Charlie finds herself baby sitting one of her cousins - who is a dragon. (That's a bit of leftover plot from the first book, incidentally)

The good bits of the book - I love the Maritime Canada settings - brilliant. I love the whole magic through baking gag. I love the 14 year old dragon. I love Charlie. The characters are fantastic - the bad people are not one dimensional, and the secondary characters are almost as well described as the primaries (which makes sense, because Huff has a tendency to spin off secondary characters - easier to do that if they are well written in the first place).

The bits that I didn't like - the bad guys are an oil company. Huff (accurately) describes Cape Breton as a region of Canada desperate for employment, which the oil company would have provided. Clearly, the drilling would have disrupted the sensitive selkie habitat, and that's bad - but Huff's characters don't really offer any solid alternatives either. In an otherwise surprisingly deep book, this conflict is dealt with rather shallowly, and that bugged me a little. Also, Charlie's ability to walk through woods results in her bopping back and forth from Cape Breton to Calgary (where her familial support base is). A dangerous ability, which threated to derail the narrative in a couple of places. Huff manages to keep the whole thing moving forward, but I felt like telling Charlie to pick a locale and stay there, damn it.

In the end, a very satisfying read, and very quick - I started the book this morning, and finished it before dinner.

Friday Review Post? Yes!

Dear merciful deity of your choice! It's Friday, and here's a review! Will wonders ever cease?

Tanya Huff - Blood Lines
This is the one with the mummy. At some point, it becomes clear that Huff is re-thinking the classic movie monsters - vampire, demon-worshiper, werewolf, mummy, zombies/Frankenstein monsters, and finishing up with ghosts. Anyway, this is, I think, my favorite of the series. What I really like about this one is that the monster is actually a monster. I also like the plot line which twists Victoria's beloved police back upon her, and finally, I really really like the point at the end of the book that Victoria and Celluci have been fighting despair for years. All in all, I think, the gem in a fairly stellar series. One more, and I can read the short story collection!

Bruce Cumings - The Korean War
Wow! I was expecting a fairly straight-forward history of the Korean War. This was NOT that book. Cumings covers the basic story in his first chapter, very briefly, and then goes off and does some seriously heavy cultural military history. His basic thesis is that Americans really have no understanding of what happened between 1950 and 1955 on the Korean peninsula, and that this is largely because they (understandably) insist on looking at the events as if they had something to do with the United States. More broadly, Cumings argues that the Korean war was the most visible/violent aspect of a Korean civil war which started in the 1930s with a new level of Japanese repression, and really hasn't ended yet. I've taught this war for several years now as the first of the Cold War proxy-wars, and that will remain an aspect of how I present the material. I will also, having read Cumings, be including the idea that what made Korea different from Vietnam was that both sides of the war (from a Korean perspective) saw themselves as the legitimate rulers of the peninsula. And, from the appropriate points of view, both sides were correct. A further point that Cumings makes is the idea that the United States was on the side of the Japanese collaborators - this was the first instance of the US siding with the repressive dictator because he was less "Communist" than the liberal reformer.

This was a seriously dense book. Cumings gave me lots to think about. He made a serious effort to connect the Korean War to current events, both in Korea and in the Middle East. His broadest possible point was that the Korean War really defined the way in which the United States has fought wars and enacted occupations since the end of World War Two. If, Cumings suggests, we are looking for a point in history where the United States "went wrong", we need look no further than the Korean War. That is, perhaps, too broad a statement to make, but he presents a very convincing argument.

Some final notes - excellent pictures throughout the book, but it needed more maps! Even given that the book was more cultural than military, the maps were entirely inadequate.

Alex Archer - The Spirit Banner
My wife described this book as slush, and she was oh so right. Because I'm sure your curious, no, Anja Creed does not have sex in this novel. Nor, however, does she consume absurd quantities of food in an obvious attempt on the part of the author to sublimate her sex drive. There is no explanation of the series title - Rogue Angel? Anja is not, as far as I've seen, an angel, she's just an archeologist with Joan of Arc's magical mystical sword. In this book, she finds Ghengis Khan's (at one point, a Mongolian calls him Chingis, which was actually his name. It would have been nice to have seen Ms. Creed correct her peers throughout - that would have been a nice touch of academic realism...) tomb. Oh, and has a fight in Mexico which was neither explained nor really resolved. She falls off of a bridge, and has a sword fight in which she reveals that she is, in fact, the bigger person, and an all around nice girl. The author indulges in military porn (that is, he describes, in painstaking detail, all of the military equipment used - this sort of gun, that sort of jeep, the other sort of helicopter, using such and such sort of ammunition, etc etc), and there's an entirely gratuitous scene where the baddy shoots up some of Anja's allies, even though she's not around to see, and never finds out about it. All of this, but despite the provocative cover image (look, I've included it so you can see what I mean - seriously, if this were a romance novel, there would be bodice ripping...), she does not have sex. Next time I have lengthy train rides where I need to put my brain to sleep, I'll grab some more of these.

Molly Crosby - Asleep
A book about the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica of the post WWI period. Fascinating stuff - a disease caused by swelling of the brain which resulted in severe lethargy (to the extent that patients' pulses were often too faint for doctors to sense) and, if the patient woke up, violent mood shifts. Linked, perhaps, to the 1918 flu pandemic, or maybe to a  concurrent strep throat epidemic (doctors are still unsure, which makes this whole thing even more interesting).

So, fascinating subject, but I have to question Crosby's organisation. She starts by breaking the book into a series of patient case files - this patient, seen by that doctor, with those symptoms - but she's really telling the story of a small group of neurosurgeons and psychiatrists and such who tried to figure out the disease during the 1920s and '30s. I almost feel as though the book would have been better served by following the doctors instead of the patients - the patient stories felt a little tacked on.

The book has ample endnotes, and an extensive bibliography, but the notes are not cited in the text, which makes it hard to find the reference points. Normally, this wouldn't bother me, but I've just finished the Keegan and the Cumings, and they are both histories written by historians, so in this book, it bugged me. Especially because Crosby includes some truly juicy information in her endnotes, and you wouldn't know it from the main text. Tsk tsk. Seriously.

Also, the glossy photos towards the end of the book really add nothing.  All in all, a fair book on an exceedingly creepy and interesting topic.

minor dilemna, and Friday review (belated) for 8/27/10

So, I have a chapter and a half to go in Keegan's First World War. I'm pretty sure what I'm going to say about the book, but I don't want to do a review of it until I've honestly finished it. So, perhaps I will review it later this week - Wednesday, maybe.

I did read some other stuff this week, however, so I should post reviews of them.

Tanya Huff - Blood Price


This is the first of Huff's vampire quintet. Over our trip, we managed to find (at a very nice used bookstore in Palo Alto) the short story collection which comes between book 4 and book 5 of the series, and so my wife re-read the whole series. She suggested that the first book had not aged well, and I wanted something light to transition to the Keegan, so I grabbed it. In many ways, she's absolutely right - this book has not aged well. It (just) pre-dates wide spread cell phones, so there are several minor crisis points where people cannot contact other people because people are either screening their calls (people used to let their answering machine pick up phone calls, to see who was calling. Did you know that? Did you do that? Anyway.) or are away from their phones. Huff's detective, Vicky Nelson, is supposed to be in her early 30's, but on a couple of occasions she voices opinions that make her sound much older - a short rant on the decline of the verb "to say", for instance ("so then she goes 'nuhuh!', and I'm like, 'unhuh!', etc") doesn't strike me (as someone in my early 30's) as something that someone in their early 30's would worry about. Perhaps. Finally, the antagonist in this book, unlike some of the later ones (as I recall) is a little flat - he's a nerd, and he's a caricature, too complete in his nerdiness. (He's also a demon summoner - that's why he's the antagonist).

All that to one side, this is still a good read. Vicky is a strong female protagonist before there were a lot of strong female protagonists. She has real relationships with the people around her, and the plot never takes back seat to her sex life. It's easy to see the influence of Huff on the authors of later paranormal romance novels (now a valid sub-genre, folks!), but this is not, and none of the books in the series ever are, a paranormal romance. Plus, in order to get to the later books, you need to read this one; it sets up the characters.

The other book I read this week was:

Richard Wilson - Don't Even Think About It
This is a take-down of the whole Dangerous Book phenomenon, what Wilson describes as the "good childhood gestapo", which contends that there is a perfect way to raise your child, and that it doesn't involve any sort of electronic games. Wilson goes through most of the activities that such books prescribe - making things out of wood, running around outside, taking family vacations "away from it all", and deflates the whole thing with dry English wit. The central premise is that authors of "ideal childhood" books are remembering an idyllic childhood that never really existed - Wilson contends that, looking back at his pre-computer, pre-electronic childhood, he found it less than idyllic, and wonders why you would wish it on anyone else.

I found his discussion on tracking wild animals to be particularly amusing, such that my wife had to steal the book and read the section herself, to see what I was laughing at.

The whole book was largely rant-y, but it was an amusing rant. I'm not sure that I accept all of the premise - surely there is a happy medium between constant video games and entirely no video games - but as an assault on the "this is the best possible way for your child to live", I found it valid.