Natterings From Nepantla

I think I last checked in on this after reading Gate of Ivrel, which I thought was a pretty average planetary romance. After that:

Well of Shiuan: Now this is something special. Suddenly we're talking about deep time, insane aristocrats, and a doomed planet that cannot be saved by some last-minute feat of technological magic. It's very much more Tolkien than Burroughs. Possibly the best middle book of a trilogy I've ever read.

Fires of Azeroth: Sort of Tolkien-like again, with the qhal sort of playing the part of wood elves. A decent conclusion to the series, but badly overshadowed by the prologue, which is a parting shot from Shiuan and just served as a reminder of how good book 2 was.

Wave Without a Shore: And then into one of the more obscure corners of the Alliance-Union continuity, in fact so obscure that you can't really tell that it is part of the Alliance-Union continuity. This takes place on a planet where everyone is ranked by brainpower and the protagonist is the smartest man on the planet, competing with the other elites to impose his own version of reality on the rest of society until events intervene.

For a while this felt like it could have been an attempt to write like Ursula K. Le Guin, until about halfway through when it suddenly turns into a standard Cherryh story of a man who goes among aliens, absorbs their mindset, and becomes a mediator between societies. Le Guin would have found time to deconstruct the whole alleged meritocracy, but Cherryh's hero remains objectively ranked #1, he's just found a new use for his talents.

Also, I've commented before that human women tend to be unlucky or incompetent in Cherryh stories where there are aliens, and this is the most extreme example yet. There are three named women in this book, and two of them exist solely to draw a contrast with the protagonist's utter brilliance, and get killed off as soon as their part in the story is done.

What I should be doing at this point is checking out Exile's Gate, but when I was looking up information about the Morgaine books, I learned about a book previously unknown to me called Witchfires of Leth, and that diverted me onto a new reading project...

Copied from althea_valara.

This week I'm reading: Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World, one of the finds at the B&N outlet.

My favorite book of all time is: On the one hand, it's hard to pick out one book. On the other, my favorite fiction author is Stanisław Lem, and my favorite of his books is The Cyberiad, so maybe that.

My current favorite book (read or re-read in the last 3 months) is: Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World is a lot of fun so far. Of books I finished in the last 3 months, probably Ballet Shoes, a childhood favorite that I recently reread. My favorite part is still the book affirming that it's fine to decide you're actually not that interested in the performing arts and want to go off and be a geek instead.

The last book I bought was: The online order I just placed for Fate's Trick, the last of the Crossroads Adventures series that I didn't have a copy of yet. Eventually I want to blog about the whole series.

The first book I bought with my own money was: No idea, probably part of an armload of used books from Powell's.

The first book I received as a gift was: Too far back to remember. But the first one I do specifically remember was The Crust of Our Earth, for my 8th birthday, which helped cement my interest in geology.

The last book I received as a gift was: Usually we do gift cards around here, but I do recall the SO tracking down a copy of Fieldwork Fail for me from a source in Belgium.

The last book I borrowed from the library was: Too long ago to remember.

This or that:
Physical book, e-book, or audio: Physical
Used, new, or fell off the back of the internet: Used
Fiction or non-fiction: Some and some
Read at a coffee shop or at the park: Park, unless the weather is terrible
Paperback or hardcover: Paperback, both cost-effective and easier to fit onto shelves
Romance or Crime: Why not both?

Yes or no:
Literary fiction? No
Sci-fi/fantasy? Yes
Poetry? Yes
Memoirs? No
Philosophy? No
Thrillers? Yes
Chronicles? Yes
Travellogues? Yes
Dialogue heavy? Not unless the dialogue is very good

I was very excited to learn about the new Aldiss Award for worldbuilding in sf, because good worldbuilding is one of the big things I look for in a book. "Story and world" has long been my shorthand for what usually determines whether I like something. So when I saw the shortlist, I had to go and check out everything on it.

Note that this is an award for just worldbuilding, and makes no warranty, express or implied, about other aspects of the books.

( Cut for those who would rather skip the book reviews )

Can anyone point me to a source for simple "This book belongs to _____" sorts of stickers? When I search for bookplates I'm just finding big fancy ones.

Written for booknook's October review-a-thon.

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Note: I planned for this to be one of my reviews all the way back in August when I signed up for the review-a-thon. The fact that it is now timely is just serendipity, I swear.

1 Dead in Attic is a collection of columns written by Chris Rose for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, starting from just after Hurricane Katrina and continuing until more than a year afterward.

It reads like a post-apocalyptic epistolary novel, but covering the messy middle time that few post-apocalyptic novels deal with, between the event itself and the distant future when the society has healed itself. The New Orleans of 1 Dead in Attic is a city in progress-- favorite businesses now sitting abandoned, damaged homes waiting on insurance checks, vanished acquaintances who might be dead or might just have moved away. Even several months after The Thing, as he calls it, as the world's attention has turned away and the big local events have been resurrected, Rose is able to give some friends a look at still-wrecked neighborhoods, and they encounter a jazz funeral for someone who passed away in the storm, just now being buried. Column after column notes the still-visible brown mark left by the height of the flood.

There are some light notes, particularly early on. There are tales of petty revenge over improper fridge disposal, and the magical moments when the toilets work again and Rose first encounters a working traffic light. But rebuilding is a long, grim slog.

Rose counts himself lucky because he and his family were able to evacuate to Vicksburg for the actual storm, their house was hardly damaged, and his wife and kids are able to stay with relatives in Maryland so the kids can go to school in a normal environment. But in the final act of the book, he is forced to admit that he too is a victim of Katrina, as the separation from his family and the constant focus on the aftermath of the storm take their psychological toll.

1 Dead in Attic is a powerful book, and a very informative book if you want to understand what parts of North Carolina will be going through in the months ahead, but it is not a happy book. Don't read this if you're already feeling down.

Written for booknook's October review-a-thon.

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Be My Guest opens with a note that it has been distributed to Hilton hotel rooms "to provide entertaining reading for our guests." That it does, unusually for a business book.

When seeing a book purporting to be about a guy rising to the top of the business from nothing just by hard luck, the cynical reader may suspect that it is actually about a guy who comes from privilege and family resources. And that reader would be right, but this one has two redeeming features that make it a worthwhile read.

The first is that, rather than the modern ideal of building a big pile of financial engineering and management metrics, Hilton pursued an older ideal of building a real business and having happy customers in an industry he genuinely loves.

The second is Hilton's own life story and the times it is woven through. He was born in the New Mexico Territory in a time the primary language was Spanish, the leading families of his town had all fled Mexico when Emperor Maximilian was defeated, and buying a new horse meant waiting for the next band of nomadic Native Americans to stop by. His adventures before discovering his true business love include being the youngest member of the first legislature of the state of New Mexico and volunteering for service in World War I at the ripe old age of 29. He experiences the Texas oil boom, which comes across as the last gasp of the Wild West; the crash of 1929; and the much worse-sounding panic of 1907, when, as he puts it, money simply did not exist for a few months.

For the first few decades, Hilton talks about the popular dances and songs, and the spirit of the times. Of World War I, he says that so much has been written about it that his experiences wouldn't add anything, but I don't think I have read a book before that has brought home so well the effect of millions of men being plucked out of their homes, seeing the great cities of Europe, and forging lasting bonds with others from all over the US. Paris is a revelation to him, and one of his new business partners afterward is a war buddy.

Once Hilton has made it through the hiccups of his first few hotel purchases, the narrative becomes duller. World War II passes in a blur of big business deals. His stint as Mr. Zsa Zsa Gabor is described as something that just sort of happened to him for a while. (Reading between the lines of that and the few details of his first marriage, Hilton must have been an absolute disaster as a family man.) The book wraps up with a couple of chapters on lessons for life and business, some of which are the old standards (find your specific talent, embrace the future, etc.) and some of which are very much part of the worldview of the times.

I am not much into business books. But the driest subject can come to life when you have the right person talking about it, and Hilton is an interesting guy to spend time with. At a mere 288 pages, you might wish for a little more of that time. Recommended, in the unlikely case that you ever cross paths with a copy.

Part III is the best of The Road to Freedom and the most frustrating.

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I feel like part III is the beginning and ending of the book I wanted to read. I'd like to have seen specific actionable suggestions from getting from where we are to where he's like to see us being.

Now to crack open The Road to Freedom. Summary of intros and part 1: many familiar modern left-wing talking points, with an unfortunate level of distraction from authorial and copyediting quirks.

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Six more chapters of The Road to Serfdom down, five to go. Left-ish beliefs still intact.

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I was intrigued recently by a mention of Joseph Stiglitz's The Road to Freedom, said to be a rebuttal to the neoliberal bible, Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Intrigued enough to want to read it, except that would mean having to read The Road to Serfdom first to really know what Stiglitz was rebutting.

Well, there I was at Powell's a few days ago intending to spend down a birthday gift certificate, and I wound up picking up both. And like I did with The Wealth of Nations, I feel the need to blog my way through them so that those of you who don't want to actually read them don't have to.

The first piece of good news is that both books combined look to be shorter than The Wealth of Nations. In fact, there's even less to the Hayek than it first appears...

( Introductions, and plenty of them )

I should note that I was taught in history class that Nazi rule came about because the reparations for World War I humiliated and financially crippled Germany, and that plus the general worldwide malaise of the 1930s made the German people so miserable that they were ready to embrace a charismatic demagogue who told them that they were actually the best people, and started providing convenient scapegoats to unite against. Economic ideology is just irrelevant to the story. So I don't think Hayek is going to be convincing me of anything, but it'll still be interesting to see where this goes.