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.

I have a stack of books that has accumulated of the last year or so as I go, "I should really write something on Dreamwidth about that one." So let me get started with the current top of the stack. (The actual most recent one has been requisitioned by the SO, who thought it looked interesting, so I'll get to that whenever I get it back.)

TakeOff Too! is a collection of Randall Garrett stories assembled in 1987. I picked it up at a convention years ago, I don't remember which one.

I hadn't read any of Garrett's work beyond the Lord Darcy stories before. After reading this collection I feel I have a better understanding of why only the Lord Darcy stories have stayed in print. Most of them are just not half as clever or funny as billed.

The stories are accentuated with a few meh Phil Foglio drawings. OTOH Foglio also contributed a truly excellent cover which is easily the best thing about the whole book.

One thing that will stick with me is the one nonfiction piece in the book, a talk Garrett gave in 1974 about John W. Campbell, which includes a song first performed in 1955 about how odious some people found his particular hobbyhorses. Whenever someone defends Campbell as merely a man of his time, I will now remember that even in 1955 enough people were put off by his beliefs for that song to be composed. I've found one copy of the lyrics online, in this comment on a Tor.com post.

Book Lovers Day: Do you love books? Have you always been a reader? Did your parents read to you when you were young? What were some of your favourite books or authors as a child? How has your taste in books evolved over time?

My parents initially taught me to read, but they also taught me how to use the pronunciation key in the dictionary, and I was really impatient, so I started using that rather than wait for the next reading session and really took off at that point.

I got into science fiction and fantasy very early with Space Cat, Narnia, and Doctor Who novelizations. But the first specific favorite author I remember having was Erma Bombeck. I found her because her column ran alongside the comics in my local paper. So the first book for adults I ever read, when I was nine, was The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. Of course the life of a housewife with three kids was pretty alien to me at the time.

Alastair Reynolds has heretofore been the author I read to tide me over between Peter F. Hamilton releases. Reynolds is best known for writing ginormous space operas, like Hamilton, but which are not, in my opinion, quite as good as Hamilton's.

Eversion, though, is cosmic horror and considerably shorter than most of Reynolds's novels. And it is very, very good. Good enough that I'm planning to put it on my Hugo ballot next year.

Unfortunately, it's also the sort of book where one can't enthuse about it in any detail without causing spoilers. So I'll have to leave it at that.