ArlieS continues her reading addiction in 2022 - Thread 2

I'm Arlie, and this is my second year of the 75 books challenge. Last year, I only needed one thread, but this year I found my thread getting quite long enough by April, and decided to celebrate May Day by creating a continuation thread. If this pace continues, I'll start another on September first (North American Labour Day).

More details about me and my reading habits can be found in my first thread.

List of books read cover-to-cover for the first time in 2022:

1. His majesty's dragon by Naomi Novik Jan 3-11, 4 stars
2. The Great Leveler : Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel Jan 1-17, 4 stars
3. We shall rise edited by John Ringo and Gary Poole
4. The price of inequality : how today's divided society endangers our future by Joseph E. Stiglitz
5. The complacent class : the self-defeating quest for the American dream by Tyler Cowen
6. The last graduate : a novel by Naomi Novik
7. Throne of jade by Naomi Novik
8. Autism equality at work : removing barriers and challenging discrimination by Janine Booth
9. Beyond by Mercedes Lackey
10. Rewriting the rules of the American economy : an agenda for growth and shared prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz
11. The economics anti-textbook : a critical thinker's guide to microeconomics by Roderick Hill and Anthony Myatt
12. Black powder war by Naomi Novik
13. Princess Elizabeth's spy by Susan Elia MacNeal
14. Lifelines : a doctor's journey in the fight for public health by Leana S. Wen
15. Last best hope : America in crisis and renewal by George Packer
16. At the end of the world by Charles E. Gannon
17. Purgatory's shore by Taylor Anderson
18. The Victorian city : everyday life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders
19. Governor by David Weber and Richard Fox
20. Briarheart by Mercedes Lackey
21. The lady's guide to celestial mechanics by Olivia Waite
22. The silver bullets of Annie Oakley by Mercedes Lackey
23. The warmth of other suns : the epic story of America's great migration by Isabel Wilkerson
24. Underbug : an obsessive tale of termites and technology by Lisa Margonelli
25. Operation shield : a Cassandra Kresnov novel by Joel Shepherd
26. The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff
27. To end in fire by David Weber and Eric Flint
28. The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff
29. Goliath : The 100-year war between monopoly power and democracy by Matt Stoller
30. The new class war : saving democracy from the managerial elite by Michael Lind
31. The tyranny of merit : what's become of the common good? by Michael J. Sandel
32. The good earth by Pearl S. Buck
33. 1636: Calabar's War (Ring of Fire) by Charles Gannon and Robert Waters
34. The future falls by Tanya Huff
35. War : how conflict shaped us by Margaret MacMillan
36. China's gilded age : the paradox of economic boom and vast corruption by Yuen Yuen Ang
37. Fire in the mist by Holly Lisle
38. An Afro-Indigenous history of the United States by Kyle T. Mays
39. Valor's choice by Tanya Huff
40. Staying alive in toxic times : a seasonal guide to lifelong health by Jenny Goodman
41. The Meritocracy trap : how America's foundational myth feeds inequality, dismantles the middle class, and devours the elite by Daniel Markovits
42. Tempest : all-new tales of Valdemar edited by Mercedes Lackey
43. First steps : how upright walking made us human by Jeremy DeSilva
44. Lost prophet : the life and times of Bayard Rustin by John D'Emilio
45. Crucible : all-new tales of Valdemar edited by Mercedes Lackey
46. An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
47. A black women's history of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross
48. Terminal Uprising by Jim C. Hines
49. The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them by Euan Angus Ashley
50. Breath taking : the power, fragility, and future of our extraordinary lungs by Michael J. Stephen
51. Two-Over-One Game Force: An Introduction by Steve Bruno and Max Hardy
52. Ageless : the new science of getting older without getting old by Andrew Steele
53. A call to insurrection : a novel of the Honorverse by David Weber, Timothy Zahn and Thomas Pope
54. Fairhaven rising by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
55. Killing floor by Lee Child
56. 1177 B.C. : the year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline
57. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
58. The better part of valor by Tanya Huff
59. The witness for the dead by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette)
60. The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
61. Brief History of Timekeeping : The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks by Chad Orzel
62. A question of honor : a Bess Crawford Mystery by Charles Todd
63. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette)
64. American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
65. Civilizations by Laurent Binet
66. The grief of stones by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette)
67. The velvet rope economy : how inequality became big business by Nelson Schwartz
68. This broken world by Charles E. Gannon
69. Origin : a genetic history of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
70. Beasts before us : the untold story of mammal origins and evolution by Elsa Panciroli
71. Has China won? : the Chinese challenge to American primacy by Kishore Mahbubani
72. Android Smartphones For Seniors For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) by Marsha Collier
73. The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain: 1880-1914 by Simon Heffer
74. An Environmental History of the Civil War by Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver
75. How fascism works : the politics of us and them by Jason Stanley
76. A place to hang the moon by Kate Albus
77. Hurricane lizards and plastic squid : the fraught and fascinating biology of climate change by Thor Hanson
78. Lincoln's Spies: Their Secret War to Save a Nation by Douglas Waller
79. The girls who stepped out of line : untold stories of the women who changed the course of World War II by Mari K. Eder
80. The princess spy : the true story of World War II spy Aline Griffith, Countess of Romanones by Larry Loftis
81. Our first civil war : patriots and loyalists in the Revolution by H. W. Brands
82. Tamed : ten species that changed our world by Alice M. Roberts
83. The constitution of knowledge : a defense of truth by Jonathan Rauch
84. Prisoners of geography : our world explained in 12 simple maps by Tim Marshall
85. Looking for the good war : American amnesia and the violent pursuit of happiness by Elizabeth D. Samet
86. Fugitive telemetry by Martha Wells
87. Fire and ice : the volcanoes of the solar system by Natalie Starkey
88. Her honor : my life on the bench ... what works, what's broken, and how to change it by LaDoris Hazzard Cordell
89. Bullshit jobs by David Graeber
90. Prisoners of geography : ten maps that explain everything about the world by Tim Marshall
91. How we'll live on Mars by Stephen L. Petranek
92. An incomplete revenge : a Maisie Dobbs novel by Jacqueline Winspear
93. First contacts : the essential Murray Leinster by Murray Leinster
(pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins
94. 25 Steps to Learning 2/1 by Paul Thurston
95. Otherlands : a journey through Earth's extinct worlds by Thomas Halliday
96. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik
97. The rise and reign of the mammals : a new history, from the shadow of the dinosaurs to us by Stephen Brusatte
98. Pastwatch : the redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card

Books read or skimmed, at least in part, but not counted for my 75.

Cookbooks, and others not read cover-to-cover
1. Fix-it and Forget-it Instant Pot Diabetes Cookbook by Hope Comerford
2. The Vegan Instant Pot Cookbook by Nisha Vora
3. Healthy and Delicious Instant Pot: inspired meals with a world of flavor by America's Test Kitchen
4. Instant Pot Miracle: From Gourmet to Everyday, 175 Must-Have Recipes
5. The Complete Instant Pot Collection: 175 Quick, Easy & Delicious Recipes by Weldon Owen

Rereads
1. The Galleon by Ronald Welch
2. Sun of York by Ronald Welch
3. Foundation by Mercedes Lackey
4. Intrigues by Mercedes Lackey
5. Changes by Mercedes Lackey
6. Bastion, by Mercedes Lackey
7. Redoubt , by Mercedes Lackey
8. The Oathbound by Mercedes Lackey
9. Oathbreakers by Mercedes Lackey
10. Oathblood by Mercedes Lackey
11. By The Sword by Mercedes Lackey

Pearl Ruled
1. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
2. Underland : a deep time journey by Robert Macfarlane
3. Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis
4. World without mind: The existential threat of big tech by Franklin Foer
5. Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates
6. Royal blood by Rhys Bowen
7. Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman
8. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
9. The magic kingdom of Landover . Volume 1 by Terry Brooks

Book Stats

Books read: 74 (through 3 Oct 2022)

Fiction: 36

- alternate history: 2
- fantasy: 19
- historical: 1
- mystery: 2
- romance: 1
- science fiction: 10
(i.e. anything set in a non-magical future, or with interstellar travel)
-- hard science fiction: 0
- time travel: 0
- none of the above: 1

- short story/novella collections: 2
- juvenile, including "young adult": 0

Non-Fiction: 38

- biography: 1
- economics: 2
- games: 0
- history: 12
- media: 0
- medicine: 4
- politics: 11
- popular social sciences (including self help): 0
- science: 6
- social sciences, psychology etc. (when primarily concerned with research and its results): 0
- technology: 1
- none of the above: 1

Books from a series: 22
(First books of a series: 11)

Language read
- English: 74
- French: 0
- German: 0

Author Gender
- male: 44
- female: 36
- multiple authors of mixed gender: 3
- genderqueer, ambiguous, etc.: 0

Author profession
- academic: 17
- activist:1
- economist: 5
- historian: 2
- journalist: 8
- medical doctor: 3
- military:
- non-novelist writer:
- novelist: 38
- mixed: 3
- policy analyst: 1
- scientist:
- science journalist:
- unknown:

Number of unique authors: not counted

(neither editors nor contributors to anthologies are counted)

Publication year

1931: 1
1997: 1
2003: 1
2006: 3
2009: 1
2010: 2
2011: 1
2012: 3
2013: 1
2014: 5
2015: 2
2016: 3
2017: 2
2018: 1
2019: 5
2020: 11
2021: 22
2022: 5

Author nationality (may wind up with country of residence, depending what I can find):

Austria: 1
Canada: 8
Singapore: 2
UK: 9
USA: 61
mixed: 3

Book Source
- Public library: 29
- Purchased new, some years ago (TBR shelf) : 1
- Purchase, new: 0
- Purchase, used: 0
- Borrowed and subsequently purchased: 0

Cumulative pages: 27,516

Reserved in case I think of something else I want to tabulate at the start of my thread.

>5 ArlieS: Sensible precaution.

New-thread orisons, Arlie.

>6 richardderus: Thank you.

I've now caught up my totals in post 4. Unusual trends - everything I've read for the first time has been from the current century, and there are an awful lot of books by American authors.

My plans for today are to attempt to finish the *two* books that dastardly fellow library patrons have made unrenewable by putting holds on. One is due tomorrow, and the other is due on May 5th.
Due to extreme diligence for the past 2 days, there are now only 95 pages left between the two of them.

Happy new thread, Arlie!

Good luck finishing the two books.
I found two with the same, only due on the 12th, and one already finished. Renewed the others, just to be sure.

>9 FAMeulstee: Thank you

One is now complete; one more to go.

Good luck with finishing yours.

Happy new one!

Happy new thread, Arlie!

I for one am not surprised that you got to a second thread comfortably this year as you have become a good pal to many of us in your relatively short time with us.

>11 drneutron: >12 PaulCranswick: Thank you both

31. The tyranny of merit : what's become of the common good? by Michael J. Sandel

In this book, a political philosopher looks at meritocracy, and dislikes what he sees. It's not that he thinks that the successful should be selected by some other means, such as race, gender or parental income - though he does consider random chance (among the capable) as a potential alternative. Rather, he thinks it's a bad idea to frame life as sorting the worthwhile/high potential from everyone else, and then farther sort them into ever smaller groups of the successful.

Why is this bad? First of all, because it makes everyone who "fails" unhappy, discounts their contributions to society, and tends towards blaming the victim. (If you didn't get a college degree/attend an Ivy League University/get a Rhodes Scholarship/become President you are likely to see yourself as worthless, and be seen that way by others.) Moreover, it'll be seen by both you and others, as "your fault", for not working hard enough. Unless, maybe, you can play the card labelled "I was discriminated against." Being the best possible plumber, or cook, or hairdresser, is worth nothing. Being your personal best is worth even less, unless that's also better than all your competition.

Second of all, because those who do succeed, or at least get part way, have sacrificed their childhood to college prep, and will continue to sacrifice everything to the false god of Success and Merit. On the one hand, they'll tend to despise everyone who made it less far up the greasy pole than they did. And on the other hand, they'll tend to despise themselves to the extent that they're no longer candidates to make it even farther. (They settled for their backup university, having been rejected by Stanford, MIT, and all the Ivy League. How shameful.)

And third of all, because it's a gigantic recipe for social conflict. When a politician who attended one of the Seven Sisters (Ivy League for females, until the Ivy League itself went co-ed, and still rather elite) and an Ivy League professional school, married to a Rhodes scholar, unthinkingly refers to the supporters of her opponent as "a basket of deplorables," it's pretty clear she's so certain of her own superiority that she doesn't even notice that those non-meritocrats are human beings, with real feelings. (And this is a politician, trained to value image over everything, and lie as readily as she speaks.) And she's just a handy sound bite example; she's very much not alone.

But the above is my rewrite of his argument, which was IMO both weaker and more academic. It's pretty clear the author spends a lot more time with people attending elite colleges, and their graduates, than he's ever spent with those who don't go to college, or even those who merely attended their local state run institution.

The book also fails to address its own subtitle adequately - he barely looks at the common good at all. He'd like to see the less educated more involved in politics - as elected politicians themselves, not just as voters (ever notice how few current members of the US congress lack college degrees? this is, by the way, relatively new). He also points out and deplores the tendency towards separation and conflict, but that's about it.

Finally, he's got a gender quirk embedded in his brain. A race quirk too. All his statistics about the non-progress of the non-college educated in recent decades are about male workers, and many of them are restricted to white male workers. Apparently a white man without academic talents should be seen as making a valuable contribution to society, both by himself and others, and it's a shame many no longer see him that way - and indeed, have arranged the economy so he's unlikely to be able to find a non-precarious, aka "good" working class job. His sister, not so much; she pretty well doesn't get mentioned, perhaps because she's always been seen as having less merit than her brother - and currently, is benefitting from reduced sexism even while losing to increased elitism. Ditto for the black guy down the street (assuming the local neighborhoods have been integrated).

I hope there are better books on this topic, because I do think it's important.

NOTE: I read this far too quickly, as someone had put a hold on it at the library, so it's possible I'm being unfair, and would have liked it better if I'd read it more slowly.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: male, American, born 1953, academic (political philosophy)
- English, public library, 272 pages, read Apr 28-May 1, 3.5 stars

>14 ArlieS: Good review, Arlie. I bought that one in February and hope to get to it soonish.

>15 PaulCranswick: I'll look forward to reading what you think of it.

The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics is such a great title i may have to look it up for that reason alone.

Love that you read a lot of non-fiction ; i Get a lot of good ideas from you

>14 ArlieS: Too bad that wasn't better. I'm very sympathetic to the argument as you've paraphrased it, and may check it out.

>7 ArlieS: What is it about Library Thing, that the only date they give for a work published before I was born is 2004 - presumably the date of the particular edition I read? No sign of a copyright date, or a date of first publication. (And yes, I looked at "work details", not just screens devoted to the book.) Amazon does this too - if you can find a date at all.

The physical book contains the actual copyright date, but I guess that's not part of the record provided by the publisher online, or some such foolishness.

I wonder if this might be part of the reason every book I read for the first time this year appeared to have been written in the current century - I trusted LibraryThing, and didn't double check the copyright date in the physical book. (And now that they are back at the library, I cannot check them easily, unless e.g. they or their author are famous enough to e.g. have a wikipedia page.)

32. The good earth by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck

This classic work of fiction has a somewhat incorrect entry in LibraryThing. It has no date associated with the work, so all I see is that the book was published in 2004. It also has it as not part of any series. I remembered seeing this book in my childhood, so I checked; according to the wikipedia page of its author, it was published in 1931 and was the first volume of a trilogy.

Quoting its wikipedia page:

The Good Earth is a historical fiction novel by American writer Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in a Chinese village in the early 20th century. It is the first book in her House of Earth trilogy, continued in Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was influential in Buck's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and drew on her first-hand observation of Chinese village life. The realistic and sympathetic depiction of the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan helped prepare Americans of the 1930s to consider Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan.

It's a good book. On the one hand, it gives a window into a culture that's long gone, and does it by showing rather than telling. On the other hand, it tells a timeless and culture free story of a hard working farmer who loved his land. He's a lot more than ordinarily successful, as peasants go, allowing the author to show us both the life of a poor (but land-owning) peasant and later of the rich man of the village, with employees and tenants, no longer personally working the land. This rise is portrayed as pretty much due to luck - while he was investing every bit of cash he could save into more land, that wouldn't have been enough on its own, without a windfall of jewels found by his wife.

I like the way this book portrays life as mixed. There are good things, and there are bad things, and change often makes some things better and other things worse. The author doesn't judge, just reports the protagonist's feelings and behaviour. As he ages, he wants peace in his home, but his two older sons are frequently in conflict, and their wives frankly hate each other. He eventually moves out of his (comparatively) palatial rich man's house in the village, back to the old house he'd lived in with his father as a poor peasant, bringing only his concubine/servant and one disabled daughter, and rather dreads his sons' dutiful familial visits.

Readers with modern sensibilities should be warned - the culture portrayed is extremely sexist. It's also slave holding; poor people commonly sell their children, and the viewpoint character both considers selling his first daughter, in a desperately bad year, and eventually buys several such slaves himself - eventually taking one of them as a concubine. (This particular case is portrayed as consensual, but it's clear that consent was not culturally required.)

I'm glad I finally got around to reading this book - I'd seen it in my school library many decades ago, and remembered the name and approximate topic, but had never read it. But I'm not enthusiastic enough to race out looking for the sequels, particularly as the first one deals with the lives of his sons, who I frankly did not much like.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes non-formula fiction that explores life outside of their own culture.

Statistics:
- Fiction, no category (might be considered historical fiction), series (first), 1931
- Author: female, American, born 1892, novelist, new
- English, public library, 357 pages, read Apr 15-May 1, 4 stars

>19 ArlieS: There are two dates, Arlie. The one you refer to (2004) is the publication date of your edition, that is the one you can edit in your own library. The other is when it was first published. That date can be found in Common Knowledge, so can't be found searching your catalog.
In "Charts and Graphs" you can find them both under "Cataloging" as "Publication Dates" and "Original Publication Dates".

>20 ArlieS: I'm always looking for books to recommend to my book club - maybe I will have a look at The Good Earth

>21 FAMeulstee: Aha. I looked in work details, but not common knowledge.

33. 1636: Calabar's War (Ring of Fire) by Charles Gannon and Robert Waters

This is yet another offering in the Assiti Shards series, and in particular its Ring of Fire sub-series, also known as the Grantville books, or the 163* series. The series takes place in an alternate history, where a 1990s American town is transported to Germany during the 30 Years War. History changes; everything is affected; lots of authors have written novels and short stories.

This particular story takes place in Brazil and the Caribbean, and involves one mixed race family's experience of the changes. The husband (Calabar) is useful to the Dutch authorities, but their high level policy decisions endanger his wife and children. Some local Dutch leaders - and especially their up time American allies - are trying to put an end to slavery, but as a side issue in the midst of other important matters, like defending themselves from Spanish aggression. Enemies (from Brazil) first prevent one son from receiving needed medicine, killing him - and then drag his wife and two remaining children out of a church and sell them into slavery. (They are "Indios", so salable.) After rescuing them, Calabar winds up dedicating himself at the end of the book to battling slavery and rescuing slaves.

This book rather failed as escapist literature; too much of the book was setting up the bad situation, and too little of it was dealing with it. It didn't do too well on character development either; the only real change was that after her personal experience as a slave, his wife is much more OK with Calabar leaving her and the children alone once again, agreeing that slavery must be fought. Calabar himself doesn't really develop - he was agin' slavery all along, and sensitive to the insults, prejudice, and subordination inherent to his mestizo status. He had the needed combat skills from the beginning, and routinely used them. All he did was make a decision, and he didn't even agonize over it.

The second half makes it as a light snack, after it becomes a book about tracking down and rescuing Calabar's wife and children, with occasion chapters from her viewpoint. The first half nearly caused it to become a DNF - it sat for about a month, started and then abandoned, because I expected escapism and optimism from the series, and got muddy ambiguous real world situations, from a viewpoint far too close to the bottom.

Another reader might like the story for precisely the reasons I disliked it, and I might have liked it better if I hadn't read it while going through an emotional patch that especially craved escapism. But I don't think it's one of the better offerings in the series.

Statistics:
- Fiction, alternate history, series (not first), 2021
- Author 1: male, American, born 1960, novelist - already read this year
- Author 2: male, American, born 1968, technical writer and sf/fantasy writer, editor, new to me
- English, public library, 307 pages, read Mar 22-May 4, 3 stars

Reread #11:By The Sword by Mercedes Lackey

I continued my project of rereading large parts of Merceds Lackey's Valdemar fantasy series. This one is the fourth and last novel in the Vows and Honor sub-series - the first three were my rereads 8-10.

This book tells the story of Kerowyn, a granddaughter of the heroines of the earlier three, with those heroines appearing early on as elders, instructors, and mentors. Kerowyn is a "natural" at medieval combat, and becomes a successful mercenary captain.

The novel is well within the escapist mold. Significant characters don't get killed. All problems are eventually solved. And the heroine is slightly overpowered. Characters do grow and change over time, but that's not the point of the story.

I gave this book 5 stars when I originally rated it, and this is not the first time I've reread it.

34. The future falls by Tanya Huff

This is the third book of Tanya Huff's Enchantment Emporium, which also provided my books 26 and 28 for this year. This is a fantasy series set mostly in present day Canada. This particular offering was OK, but not much better than that. It lacks the fun local colour of the second volume - the setting could be any modern city - and in fact it feels (somewhat inaccurately) as if much of the action took place in non-ordinary reality.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, series, 2014
- Author: female, Canadian, born 1957, novelist, already read this year
- English, public library, 326 pages, read May 1-7, 3 stars

35. War : how conflict shaped us by Margaret MacMillan

My capsule summary of this book was "survey of war and especially reactions to it, attempts to limit it, etc. mostly western." It's got lots of information, and points out some of the changes in the "history" of the same war over time, and how some authors have been radically re-interpreted. (Was some particular work glorifying war, or satirizing it? The standard viewpoint has changed over time.)

I'm not sure it really addresses "how conflict shapes us" as much as "how (mostly modern western) humans react to war, potential war etc." But it's got a good survey of recent (200 years or so) wars and attempts to limit war, along with some material on earlier wars and the societies that waged them.

Overall a decent book, but not one I'd rave about. But OTOH, I can't think of any single-volume treatment of the same topics I'd recommend ahead of this, one. The real problem is that the topic probably needs a multi-volume series, at least when approached from a historian's perspective.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: female, Canadian, born 1943, academic (international history)
- English, public library, 312 pages, read Apr 29-May 8, 3.5 stars

I've achieved a somewhat dubious milestone: I've totally run out of unread fiction borrowed from the library.

Fortunately all is not lost - I can start on the true Mount TBR. And there are three I purchased recently, so aren't remnants after reading all the books from Mount TBR that actually grabbed me. (Some of the books in Mount TBR need to be transferred to Mount DNF, and then de-acquisitioned.)

Actually, I started 2 of the most recent 3 last night - the first I picked up failed to grab me, but the second one came close to keeping me up later than I'd consider optimal. I don't expect it will remain unfinished long.

>28 ArlieS: A desirable outcome to a less-than eventuation.

>24 ArlieS: I think the last of those books I read was a Grantville Gazette title early-ish in the run. They're samey after a while, no matter who is at the helm. Diminishing returns, etc etc.

>28 ArlieS: Run out of books? I had a little shudder there at first!

>30 PaulCranswick: That would be a terrible fate. Though I do still have plenty of borrowed non-fiction.

36. China's gilded age : the paradox of economic boom and vast corruption by Yuen Yuen Ang

This is a book about the relationship of corruption and economic development, with China today and the United States' Gilded Age as the main examples. "Everyone knows" that corruption is bad for development, but developing states - whether European states in the past, or today's developing countries - can't afford to pay their government employees enough to live on, so they supplement their official pay with corruption. This keeps the states in a trap where the corruption prevents development, which prevents being able to support an adequate civil service, which prevents getting rid of the corruption. But maybe this isn't correct.

Some states manage to develop in spite of high levels of corruption. The British managed an Industrial Revolution. The United States managed to go from the corrupt Gilded Age to the less corrupt Progressive era. And China's managing to develop at a great rate, in spite of high levels of corruption.

The author advances a simple explanation: not all corruption is created equal. She classifies corruption according to a 2 by 2 grid - petty and grand; theft and exchange. The following four quotes come from p. 10

Petty theft - "acts of stealing, misuse of public funds, or extortion among street-level bureaucrats"
Grand theft - "embezzlement or misappropriation of large sums of public monies by political elites who control state finances"
Speed money (petty exchange) - "petty bribes that businesses or citizens pay to bureaucrats to get around hurdles or speed things up"
Access money (grand exchange) - "high-stakes rewards extended by business actors to powerful officials, not just for speed, but to access exclusive, valuable privileges"

The other key point is that behaviours that fit one of these categories may be perfectly legal in some or all jurisdictions. Behaviours in the access money category are particularly prone to be legal. (That's less obvious from the definition I quoted above, and more obvious from examples in the text.)

The rest of the book is pretty much about China, with a bit of the US Gilded Age thrown in for comparison. That was interesting too. How does one measure corruption, when few admit to it? How does one make use of pronouncements from state controlled press, when you have no reason to believe they are either entirely true or complete? How do you compare those to stories in freer news systems?

A good and useful read overall. I don't know how much it repeats things others have already said, not being familiar with the field, but am inclined to believe this simple categorization is original, especially in combination with a way to get a usable (if none too precise) measures of the sub-types.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: female, Singapore, age unknown (BA 1999-2002), academic (political science), new to me
- English, public library, 257 pages, read May 3-10, 4 stars

37. Fire in the mist by Holly Lisle

This is a fun fantasy novel. The heroine is a very competent peasant shepherd with a very strong talent for magic. After disaster strikes her village, she is strong armed into a university of magic, in spite of lacking such basics as literacy. The university is in a city where male and female mages and their institutions are entirely separate; there's a university for male mages at the other side of town. (There's no such separation among the peasants. But they also aren't pre-occupied with research into ever more interesting magic.)

She has problems fitting in, of course - but more importantly, it turns out that the university itself has problems - several murders, and the reappearance of entities involved in the ancient conflict that split male and female mages. As you can expect, the heroine becomes involved in the conflict, which is eventually resolved more or less satisfactorily.

The things I liked were:
- lots of descriptions of the peasant society at the beginning; it appeared to be thought out and workable
- somewhat non-standard magic, rather than the same thing as every third fantasy novel. And hints that people who could do the same magic nonetheless understood it very differently. Unfortunately, though, the magic system is never explained, and may well not be self-consistent.
- A third, barbarian culture, which first appears is the person of the deputy leader of the female mage school, with lots of fun little details. I look forward to learning more about this in the sequels, if I can find them.
- Humour.
- Lightweight references to very non-standard lifestyles. (The barbarians recognize 13 sexual orientations?!) Note here that this appears to be a first novel, and was published in 1992; this might be less amusing from an experienced author writing in 2022.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, series (first), 1992
- Author: female, American, born 1960, novelist, new to me
- English, purchased (used), 291 pages, read May 7-10, 4 stars

Paul C is a dangerous man. I caught up on his latest thread, and wound up with 9 new books on my TBR list - and the number was so low only because I exercised immense self control.

1. Millennium : A History of the Last Thousand Years by Felipe Fernandez Arnesto
2. The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark
3. Sovietistan by Erika Fatland
4. Cromwell : Our Chief of Men by Antonia Fraser
5. The History of Economics by John Kenneth Galbraith
6. Inside Right by Ian Gilmour
7. The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner
8. The Dark Continent by Mark Mazower
9. What is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

>14 ArlieS: I read The Velvet Rope Economy by Nelson D. Schwartz last year and it sounds like he makes many of the same points, Arlie. You might give it a try.

>20 ArlieS: That is a classic that I still need to read. Thanks for the reminder!

>33 ArlieS: Adding that one to the BlackHole. Thanks for the recommendation, Arlie.

>34 ArlieS: Paul C is extremely dangerous for me. I do not even want to think how many books he has added to the BlackHole!

Happy Friday! Have a wonderful weekend!

>34 ArlieS:, >35 alcottacre: Yes he is… 😀

>36 drneutron: Arlie and I, on the other hand, are not at all dangerous. Are we, Arlie?

>35 alcottacre: Thank you so much for recommending The Velvet Rope Economy. My second attempt at the same topic, The Meritocracy Trap looks like it has some of the same problems; fortunately I'm only on p.40 so I can still hope for it to surmount them.

>37 alcottacre: DeNial is a River in Egypt. But OTOH, I don't recall either of us ever getting 9 with one blow.

>35 alcottacre: No problem. Hopefully The Meritocracy Trap will improve for you.

>34 ArlieS: Didn't realize that Antonia Fraser had written a book on Cromwell - an in treating historical figure i don't know a heck of a lot about.

Diving in

>35 alcottacre: what >39 alcottacre: said

38. An Afro-Indigenous history of the United States by Kyle T. Mays

This was a good book, though the title is a bit misleading. It might be better named Topics in Black, Native American and Other Indigenous History, primarily in the United States. But that leaves out the focus on relations between the two groups, and the author's thoughts on what an ideal world might look like.

The author is a black-appearing American professor of mixed Saginaw Chippewa and black ancestry, with the Chippewa ancestry recent enough to have had contact with plenty of non-black Chippewa relatives. This matters, because in some ways this book is about whatever and whoever inspired him, as a young person learning how the world he lived in works, and what places were available to him in that world.

He's very much interested in stressing resistance to settler society by peoples who'd now be assigned to one or other of his two inherited identities(*). And not just blatant resistance - rebellions and escapes - but especially cultural resistance. He spends a lot of time on e.g. early black and native American authors. But he also spends a lot of time on modern resistance, including e.g. MLK Jr, with special interest in the modern relationship of blacks and natives looking for justice.

His background also brings up contradictions in the goals of the two groups. If the descendants of natives properly own all the land in North America, where do American born black people belong? He doesn't try to resolve this, but he does notice the potential conflict. (I spent that whole section thinking about Israel, where the survivors from an oppressed minority were compensated - with land their actual oppressors had no legitimate claim to. But the author doesn't connect those dots, seeing Jews as just another group of "settlers".)

The other thing he stresses is that the blacks brought to the Americas were themselves indigenous people. He sees that as a potential bridge between the two groups even now, and stresses that American blacks have not in fact lost all of the indigenous culture they brought with them.

I learned a lot. I'm not especially familiar with US history, let alone the part most American schools entirely fail to cover, or the writings of various seekers for justice. This book was full of things I didn't know. But I'd want to get other authors' takes on the same material, or read some of the relevant classics myself, before considering myself to have any kind of true(**) understanding.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, American (black + Chippewa), age unknown, academic (African American studies, American Indian studies and history), new to me
- English, public library, 257 pages, read May 8-18, 4 stars

(*) I don't know what identities would have been relevant to generations of Africans, African-Americans, and Native Americans before modern times, but suspect that they wouldn't have matched modern categories. At a guess, a Chippewa was a Chippewa first, or even a member of a particular band of Chippewa, for much of the relevant period.

(**) Well, as "true" as I can get without having lived it myself, and without being part of either relevant oppressed group.

>42 ArlieS: It's a good thing to start your infoquest with such a tendentious source.

Enjoy the slide into the weekend.

39. Valor's choice by Tanya Huff

This marines-in-space novel was hilarious. It starts out following several tropes I've seen enough to consider trite, but it plays them for laughs, and does so very well.

We have the federation of ultra-civilized sentients incapable of violence, attacked by a vicious non-negotiating opponent, which recruited younger, less civilized races to fight for it. As usual, humans are such a species. We have marines in space. We have a cynical NCO, a brand new second lieutenant, and a general who is primarily interested in personal fame. We even have a ne'er-do-well soldier who's great in combat, but constantly in hot water back at base.

The unit is sent on a supposedly easy mission, providing a ceremonial guard for a group of diplomats, negotiating the entry of another young species into the federation. True to form, it turns into a combat mission, and the unit wins, losing almost none of the non-combatant diplomats in the process. But the surprises aren't over. They even surprised me, and I've read a lot of this genre, so I'm not going to spoil them.

I'm now eagerly hunting for the other volumes in the series (this is the first of 8); sadly, one local library has books 6, 7 and 8; the other only has 4, 5 and 7. I'll just have to buy books 2 and 3. (Or see if I can get them thru inter-library loan.)

Statistics:
- Fiction, science fiction, first of a series, 2000
- Author: female, Canadian, born 1957, novelist, already read this year
- English, purchased used, 409 pages, read May 12-18, 4 stars

I'm past the halfway point on 75 new books read in 2022, and it isn't even the end of the 5th month of the year. And my knee has recovered enough from my foolish attempt to exercise like a 20 year old that I did fine shopping and then walking the dog without the knee support sleeve yesterday; I'll be able to get back to brisk walks again once the current mini heat wave subsides.

I celebrated by requesting one inter-library loan book, putting holds on several books in the local library system, and ordering another batch of used science fiction paperbacks.

>45 ArlieS: Congratulations on your reading progress (as well as your injury recovery progress)!

>46 ChrisG1: Thank you.

40. Staying alive in toxic times : a seasonal guide to lifelong health by Jenny Goodman

This book was not my usual fare - it's a guide to healthy eating, specifically on a seasonal basis, for people living in the UK. I don't live in the UK, but I do tend to vary what I'm eating based on what's in season locally - fresh, local produce tastes better, and tends to have a lower carbon footprint.

The book also has lots of tips and claims I'd consider part of the common knowledge of the alternative medicine community, which generally lack good supporting evidence. ("I did that, and got better" isn't good supporting evidence, when the problem is something most people recover from.) But in this case, the author is trained as a medical doctor, as well as in nutritional and environmental medicine.

The book is quite readable, doesn't issue idiotic recommendations (dangerous nostrums), and plainly expects the reader to see their general practitioner regularly. She has footnotes and references, many to reputable medical journals. But my reality check alarm kept going off regardless, particularly when it came to risks from dental fillings, concerns about electro-magnetic radiation - including the 5G phone network, and the whole section on detoxification.

The only thing I've tried, so far, is taking my B-complex vitamin pill in the morning rather than the evening. (The author says it's likely to energize one over the short term - better plan in the morning than just before bed. This may have helped slightly with my combination of sleep onset insomnia and slow start in the morning, but any change in the 7 days I've been doing this is within normal variation.)

There's a couple more things I want to try. She suggests not taking iron and zinc at the same time, and likewise for calcium and magnesium. In each case, the former tends to interfere with the absorption of the latter. I may try replacing my multivitamin/multimineral supplement with one that only has the vitamins, and taking the minerals as individual pills, with one lot in the morning and the other in the evening. She also suggests baths with epsom salts as a better way to absorb magnesium than pills; when my feet are sore I sometimes soak them in water with epsom salts; I may try doing this once a week or so even if they aren't sore.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, medicine, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: female, British, age unknown (qualified in medicine in 1982), medical doctor, new to me
- English, public library, 377 pages, read May 11-21, 3.5 stars

You've reached cruising altitude, Arlie. I'm delighted that your ill-advised burst of youthful vigor isn't exacting any further prices from you. And you're clearly getting some very enjoyable reading done!

...maybe I should rethink the policy of not aiming book-bullets at you...

>49 richardderus: You've been doing your share of hitting me with book bullets, though you'd have to work hard to outdo Paul.

Fortunately(?) you have more tolerance than I have for "heavy" books about the ills of the world. And I have no use for your favorite genre of romance novel ;-) So I'm partly immunized against your BBs.

>50 ArlieS: Life Goal: make Arlie want to read a gay romantic novel enough to go and get it.

I might've just punched my immortality ticket...or the one for the next train out....

>51 richardderus: Hmmm. I could imagine reading a male-male romance. (I've already read several female-female, including one this year, so if lesbian counts as gay for you, it's already happened.)

But I'm going to skip the sex scenes, even more than I do when at least one participant is female, so less would be more in that area. And I doubt there are many male-male romance novels which fade to black on the way to the bedroom...

>52 ArlieS: *gleeful hand-rub*

You will not make it out of June intact.

41. The Meritocracy trap : how America's foundational myth feeds inequality, dismantles the middle class, and devours the elite by Daniel Markovits

The thesis of this book is similar to my #31, but it goes a lot deeper, and is overall a better book. The author chronicles an increase of inequality in roughly the top half of the US income distribution, steepest at the top, and associates it with what he sees as the higher productivity of superordinate workers, as evidenced by insanely long hours and multiple academic degrees primarily from the most exclusive institutions.

He tells a story of the working rich, who have to run as hard as they can to both stay in the same place, and give their children a good chance of winding up equally rich. They start with elite, expensive, competitive preschools, and compete their way up the ladder, through elite boarding schools, elite universities, and elite graduate training, and then into highly selective employers (like major law firms), and onward - working insane hours the whole while. If they step off the treadmill, they can't afford to give their children the training they'll need to have a significant chance at a similar lifestyle.

Meanwhile, everyone else is stuck competing with these highly trained offspring of the current elite, so that the offspring of the non-elite (not specifically the poor), between them, share rather less than half the slots available, and basically have no reasonable chance of this kind of success.

All this, in the name of "meritocracy". The current elite pass their privilege to their children, not by leaving them money - which would in any case be potentially subject to inheritance taxes - but by paying for them to accumulate social capital, which the author equates to superior ability. This is far more stressful than simply passing down an income stream to yet another generation of rentiers. But it tends to cause many people to believe that the successful deserve their success, and discount that there's nothing resembling equality of opportunity.

Unfortunately, there are several elephants in the room.

Perhaps it's all about credentialism. The graduates of Harvard Law school aren't better lawyers than the graduates of Also Ran Law school, but the best paying, most reputable law firms don't hire from Also Ran, so their graduates don't earn as much, and thus are deemed less capable. Ditto for folks with Harvard undergraduate degrees - compared with other undergraduate degrees. Those from Also Ran university rarely get admitted to Harvard Law, or Harvard Business school, and have to settle for Also Ran grad school, or no grad school at all. Ditto for high schools, all the way down the food chain. Why do this? Well, basically because the Elite want folks-like-them as the next generation of elite.

Perhaps it's all about genetics. Generations of meritocracy have promoted those better at academic accomplishment and/or the kind of soft skills that enable one to sell unsafe financial innovations. Maybe they've even promoted those who are better at some things that are more directly useful. Their children are more likely to have similar talents than other random children.

Perhaps we just have an insanely unfair winner-take-all system, combined with too many qualified competitors. The winners in many of these competitions might average .01 % better than the losers, but get 10 times the reward. As it happens, there's some evidence suggesting that those on the boundary of admission to elite universities (e.g. Harvard) do about as well overall whether or not they are admitted. The genius with near guaranteed admission does better, bringing the average of elite institution graduates up. And the person not qualified for the elite institution brings down the averages for the less elite institution where they end up. But going to Harvard (or wherever) doesn't provide much in the way of extra, on top of what the same person would have gotten if they went to their Backup University. (The author seems unaware of this research.)

Obviously, no one book can cover everything, but this author doesn't even mention these alternate hypotheses, or the evidence supporting them. In his book, folks with more education are more capable. Ditto for more expensive education (in terms of funds spent, not necc. price paid by the student). He's so sure of this that he conflates the two. I'm not surprised to find out that he personally teaches at one of these elite institutions.

My other criticism is that I'm never sure which group he's talking about. At one moment, he's comparing people with and without a college degree. At another moment, he's comparing the top 1% by income with "the middle class". Then he turns around and talks about people who failed to complete high school. He also buries his definition of the "middle class" in a footnote, which I didn't see until after I'd read all the text.

While I'm nit picking, I'll also note that the footnotes are at the back of the book, in small print that's hard to read, and arranged in multiple columns. There's also some needless repetition.

Overall, it's a good book, but I want it to be better, and I'd love to have a few hours to argue with the author at a convention somewhere - assuming he's not so sure of his superior capability, as evidenced by his superior credentials, as to be unwilling to listen.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2019
- Author: male, American, born 1969, academic (law)
- English, public library, 418 pages, read May 12-24, 4 stars

I'm approaching a new record - I started considering Pearl-ruling World without mind: the existential threat of big tech by Franklin Foer when I read the blurb and testimonials on the back and inside covers, before even reading the table of contents.

It's not because the topic isn't what I expected, or anything like that - it's the ratio of hyperbole to nuance, and the absolute count of incorrect statements in an area where I have personal experience.

Maybe I'm just in a horrifically bad mood, unwilling to be satisfied by anything less than perfection? If I follow Nancy P's rule, as written, I should read thru page 36 before giving it back to the library. Or if I follow my own usual practice, I should read to a good stopping place, then put it on the shelf for at least a week, to see whether I develop any impulse to pick it up again.

On the other hand, it will be due and unrenewable on the 13th of June, and I'll be visiting the library it came from (a good 35 minute drive away) on or before Friday May 27 to collect some holds, and then may have no other reason to visit it again for weeks. (I have one other book from there due June 13 and not yet finished; if I finish it by Friday, I can return the lot.)

>55 ArlieS: Your own best practice seems to be quite sensible, but given that you've got relevant subject-matter expertise, your mood might not play the role it would in a less-familiar milieu. Read the 36pp and take your temperature. Then bye-bye bookie if it is found wanting, is my own advice. Why waste a second trip unless the drive is made worth it by a pleasurable read?

>44 ArlieS: I suspect most of these "Marines In Space" books were written by non-coms - there's ALWAYS a shavetail Second Looie running around making a well meaning ass of himself

>47 ArlieS: fascinating review of The Meritocracy Trap will have to look at that one. Curious that a lot of people who crawled out of Blue Collar Land and worked their tails off to somehow get a college degree and a better paying life turn smartly around and do everything in their power to smooth the path for the kids to have the same better life without working to earn it.

So many medieval kings took the throne by guts and brains and then left said throne to their lazy and foolish sons who promptly threw the whole shooting match away.

>57 magicians_nephew: Both authors insist that the children work for their elevated position, and that in fact they work very hard indeed. Certainly cramming to pass admissions tests for competitive nursery schools sounds like a lot of work to me. I question whether this work is useful, in terms of ability and inclination to make anyone else's life better, but it does seem to be quite useful for acquiring money. (I won't say "earning" money. IMO none of the bailed-out bankers who got bonuses after 2008 *earned* anything but an ignominious firing, possibly with criminal charges. Bankers figuring out how to privatize profit while socializing risk was doubtless "brilliant", but it's the kind of brilliance that should be discouraged quite forcefully.)

>55 ArlieS: >56 richardderus: World Without Mind has improved somewhat (now at p. 55) and there's no way I'll finish Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin before my trip to the library this afternoon (I'm at p. 205 of 568), so the former will be getting a reprieve.

OTOH, I'm positively craving books that aren't "heavy", aka connected with politics, or ongoing problems. I've started First Steps: How upright walking made us human and may well finish it before completing either of the first two, even though they have only 17 days before they'll be due and unrenewable, whereas First Steps potentially has 59.

First Steps was a lucky find. I'd driven my housemate to the library(*), gathered up any holds I had there, and found myself with a very sore knee, unwilling to accompany her while she pillaged the stacks. A kind librarian found me a chair, and I sat down beside the new non-fiction shelves and browsed.

The book I should be reading before First Steps, based on due dates, is A Black Women's History of the United States, with only 26 days to run. But I just can't handle another "heavy" book right now, and it's from the library(*) just a few blocks away. (I walk there, unless my knee's acting up or it's beastly hot out.) So it won't be a disaster if I have to return it, and check it out again at some later time.

I also expect some of the fiction I'll be picking up today to unabashedly jump my queue. I prefer a 50:50 ratio between fiction and non-fiction, which isn't what I've been having recently.

(*) We are members of two different library systems - the local one, with a single branch, which we can walk to, and another which has lots of branches, each at least a half hour's drive away. They do interlibrary loan, but the number of books you can get at a time that way is very limited. So we drive to the remote one from time to time.

The remote one, with its many branches, is a nuisance in another way. If they own all 8 volumes of some series, it's practically guaranteed that each volume is on the shelves at only 2 or 3 branches, and no branch has more than 2 or 3 members of the series. We pretty much always have to use holds to get all the books we want into one place, and then we have only 6 days from when the first arrive at our chosen branch until when we have to collect them. This was a massive PITA when we were both working, and could really only visit branches on weekends; now it's just a minor inconvenience.

>59 ArlieS: Aha. Makes perfect logistical sense and, while I'm calibrated ever so slightly differently as all books I check out are ebooks, I'm totally on board with the "lighter fare, pls" messages delivered from my story-stomach.

Pearl rule #4: World without mind: The existential threat of big tech by Franklin Foer

DNF, plus a rating of 1, for making untrue statements that cannot easily be explained by ignorance, leaving me doubting every other statement in the book.

The specific statement I caught may not be easily understood by those outside of the field of software development. But it follows a mostly correct (simplified for non-engineers) definition of the misunderstood term (algorithm), so the author clearly understands the term well enough to realize he's stating a falsehood.

And if one were to believe the statement he makes, and take it seriously, the consequences would be to at least eliminate all software, and perhaps all recipes, procedures, check lists etc.

Why? Because their purpose is to erode free will.

What he probably means is that Facebook's algorithms for selecting what they show you, of the things you've told them you want to see, are designed to get you to react in ways that are profitable for Facebook; he may also have intended to communicate that various other tech companies design key interfaces with similar intent.

Yes, they frequently do. And while that could be as benign as trying to make a good product, so people will buy it, when people point this out they generally have something worse in mind. But that's not all algorithms, or even most algorithms.

Here's the offending quote, from p. 77 "Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction."

I simply cannot trust any of his statements about the history of ideas, or of technology, or anything else I don't already know well not to be as egregiously and tendentiously wrong as this particular sentence, and the rest of the paragraph continues in the same vein.

An algorithm is a set of instructions for doing something. They are usually used by people who want to do that particular thing. (When I program one into a computer, I want the computer to do that thing for me.)

I don't believe that when you give me your recipe for chocolate cake, you are eroding my free will. I can make that cake, make a different one, modify your recipe, or eschew cake and even cooking entirely. But without being given a cake recipe, it'll be a cold day in hell before the average novice baker successfully produces any kind of cake.

>61 ArlieS: I can certainly see why that wouldn't pass your sniff test, given your understanding of the topic. The tendentious way of wordsmithing on this general topic...Big Tech's Motives...is certainly not scientific. I'm not sure I agree that it's wrong although I see your point about it falsifying the nature of algorithms as tools.

>62 richardderus: Oversimplifying a lot, there are two ways to decide what to believe. One method involves looking at evidence. The other involves deciding based on the status of the person who says it.

In the extreme case of the second method, where one quite reasonably (sic) believes only elderly white males in the top 1% by wealth and income, since their success proves (sic) that they have a better idea of reality than anyone else, certain things are systematically unbelievable. (Example picked based on your known concerns, intentionally tendentious.)

With the second method, it's of course OK for people with sufficient stature to be deemed believable, to say that which will cause lesser mortals to do what they (i.e the Great Men) know (sic) would be better for humanity, regardless of truth or falsehood.

Franklin Foer objects to this when it's done by Facebook. But in his attempt to raise the alarm against Facebook, he's doing precisely the same thing.

From which I can cynically conclude he wants readers to join his team, because he's an alpha male in competition with another alpha named Jeff Bezos. He wants us all to believe his Truth, not Bezos' Truth.

More realistically, his unexamined assumptions have run away with him.

But that's not my real issue; it's that I simply can't tell when the Great Man (TM) is telling the truth as he understands it, when he's exaggerating for effect, and when he's simply making things up, or credulously repeating something an even greater man once told him.

So whatever a Great Man (TM) says is only useful for analyzing what he and his followers are likely to support, enforce, forbid or punish.

My secondary issue is that in a decade or two of this particular sort of writing, "algorithm" may have a new meaning, perhaps akin to "fascism", and I'll have to learn and keep up with the latest euphemisms for its current technical meaning, if I want to understand writing about software, or communicate about software myself without having everyone younger than me see evil dog whistles in everything I say.

And yes, I guess I'm a bit of a crank on this subject, and worse before I've finished my morning coffee.

>63 ArlieS: Of course you're a crank. That's what makes you recognizably you. But that doesn't mean you're wrong. Merely undercaffeinated. (Mostly.)

:-P

42. Tempest : all-new tales of Valdemar edited by Mercedes Lackey

With two library books coming due and unrenewable soon, and another closing in on that state, I nonetheless read as many pages of this as of the three others combined, and, unsurprisingly, finished it first.

That's not because this book was so wonderful that I couldn't put it down. It's a fine collection of fantasy stories in an ongoing series, but not stay-up-late-no-matter-what-wonderful. But escapism was what I wanted, so this collection really hit the spot, in a way non-fiction with political implications just couldn't manage. :-)

Read this if you like escapist fantasy, and are fond of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2016, stories
- Editor: female, American, born 1950, novelist (already read this year)
- Authors: 21 people, including both males and females, many living in the United States, and at least one living in Canada; coding both gender and nationality as "multiple"
- English, public library, 394 pages, read May 28-June 2, 3.5 stars

43. First steps : how upright walking made us human by Jeremy DeSilva

This is a non-fiction book on hominid evolution, focussing in particular on upright walking, which arose well before many of the other things we think of as distinctive to humans.

I enjoyed reading this book, and while I didn't spot anything earth-shakingly new _to me_, it looks like it gives an excellent summary of current understanding, expressed in terms any lay reader can easily understand.

The author is a paleontologist (not yet another science writer). His research focus is the foot and leg bones of human ancestors. So he very much knows what he's talking about.

He starts by looking at other bipedal animals. Many dinosaurs were bipedal, and birds are bipedal today.This gives a nice start at looking at the question "what is bipedalism good for", i.e. why would it be favored by evolution.

We are then given a tour of fossilized footprints, fossilized bones, hominid species, and the author's interaction with some of these - where he participated in the research, we read about it from that point of view.

There was a bit too much about the people, from my POV; if I wanted that I'd be reading a biography - but it seems that a consensus has been reached that readers want their scientific knowledge humanized, and won't remember anything about e.g. Sahelanthropus tchadensis unless it comes complete with a discussion of the dangers of fossil hunting in Chad, or a description of the person who found the type fossil for the species. Any recent science book has this, and if the author is a science writer, it's also loaded with information like the colour of shirt worn by each researcher interviewed by the author.

I'm giving the book 4 stars rather than 5 for that, and for working too hard to convince the reader that various 60 year old popular representations of human evolution are wrong. (Doesn't anyone with half an interest in the subject know by now that they aren't just wrong; they are laughable?) Also, for following another unfortunate modern practice - there are no footnote indicators in the text; there are footnotes at the end, identified by chapter and page number, and sometimes brief quotations from the main text. But you can't easily tell, reading the text, whether there's any farther explanation for a surprising statement, or information about where you could find out more about something that interests you.

But overall it's a great book, and well worth a read if you want to update what you learned about human origins 20+ years ago, or want a comprehensive tour of what we now know about those origins, or simply enjoy reading science books.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, American, born , scientist (paleoanthropologist)
- English, public library, 334 pages, read May 26-June 4, 4 stars

That's two books I've now finished, instead of the 3 "heavy" reads I need to finish soon - 2 due on the 13th of June and one on the 22nd. Each morning I dutifully read enough pages from each that if I maintain this pace, they will be finished before they have to go back to the library, but that's all. Then I often read something else as a palate cleanse.

For the record, the 3 "heavies" are:

- Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John d'Emilio
- An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
- A Black Women's History of the United States by Diana Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

All three of these are fairly good. But the stories they tell are full of bad things that produce anger and hopelessness in me; I have to ration time spent with things that produce emotions like this. (FWIW, I ration news media even more strictly.)

44. Lost prophet : the life and times of Bayard Rustin by John D'Emilio

This is the biography of an American political activist. I had never heard of him until he was mentioned in George Packer's Last best hope : America in crisis and renewal which was the 15th new book I read this year. I was interested, and followed up with this book from its bibliography.

Bayard Rustin 1912-1987 was black, gay, and a pacifist. He was arguably one of the first to bring Gandhian non-violence to the United States, and influenced Martin Luther King Jr. in this direction.

His activism eventually connected racism, imperialism, colonialism, poverty and violence - while he started as a pacifist activist, he came to see all of these as connected, and ultimately focussed more on the plight of the poor and black, less on opposition to war per se.

The one obvious place his activism didn't take him was gay rights - his sexual interest in men functioned more as a curse that limited his activism, as opponents could and did use it against him, making him unwelcome in visible roles.

I could go on, but I'm not writing anywhere near as well as his biographer. To learn more about him, and about the issues and opportunities of his times, I suggest reading the book. 5 stars.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history (biography), series: n/a, 2003
- Author: male, American, born 1948, academic (history; women's and gender studies)
- English, public library, 568 pages, read May 20-June 7, 5 stars

45. Crucible : all-new tales of Valdemar edited by Mercedes Lackey

This is another collection of stories in the same universe as my #42 for the year, but I read them out of order - this is anthology #9, and the one I read earlier was anthology #10.

That made things a little weird, as in many cases there are stories with the same characters in both collections, with the events in the earlier anthology coming earlier in their lives. So by reading these out of order, and one after another, I was traveling backwards in character time.

The stories were all enjoyable, and some were especially fun. I particularly enjoyed the story that began when a too-well-organized group of bandits kidnapped a healer to treat their injured leader, and then kept her to treat all the other minor complaints in their band.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2015, stories
- Editor: female, American, born 1950, novelist (already read this year)
- Authors: 16 people, including both males and females, many living in the United States, and at least one living in Canada; coding both gender and nationality as "multiple"
- English, public library, 343 pages, read June 2-9, 4 stars

>67 ArlieS: One "heavy" book completed (#44 above), and less than 100 pages remaining in the other two, combined. The earliest due date is next Monday, so I'm on track to finish them both. But OTOH, I've finished yet another book of short stories, and started another non-fiction book that's focussed on science rather than politics, which I still have 45 days to finish.

46. An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

This is a far better book than Franklin Foer's World without mind: The existential threat of big tech which I pearl-ruled at the end of May. That rejection was the reason I read this book - I expressed my opinion of that book to my housemate, who promptly produced this one, which she had borrowed from the same library where I'd gotten the Foer book. It's not perfect - what is? - but I never once considered hurling it across the room. In fact, I rather liked it, in spite of the moderately high stress topic.

This book is a history of FaceBook's profit-seeking behaviour and its hopefully unintended bad consequences, plus the attempts of its executives to avoid mending their (profitable) ways once the bad consequences became obvious to all. It also has some interesting details about the amount and types of information about FaceBook users available inside of FaceBook.

The book was written by two New York Times journalists, and for once my reflexive dislike of books by journalists was unwarranted. The subject matter properly falls in the domain of news - several years of it - with much of it requiring investigative reporting to unearth - so journalists have relevant special skills, rather than coming across as clueless outsiders. They resisted any urge they had to hyperbole and clickbait; I could pretty easily determine the authors' values, but I never got the feeling that exaggerations were obscuring useful information.

Presumably they selected information that supported the points they wanted to make, and omitted "distractions," as well as being subject to all the usual biases of human information processing. I wouldn't take everything they say as Gospel truth, particularly with politics involved. But that's normal for the territory.

If you want to read one book to get an idea of Facebook's problems, and how it got that way, including a lot you might have picked up already from news stories, I recommend this book, at least until it becomes dated. (The story is still ongoing.)

If you want to totally understand the situation, read all relevant books and articles, if you can stomach them, and then do your own investigative reporting - and still expect to have some things wrong. But for me, this book is enough for at least another 5 years.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: female, American ?, born ???, journalist, new to me
- Author: female, American ?, born ???, journalist, new to me
- English, public library, 333 pages, read June 2-10, 4 stars

47. A black women's history of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali N. Gross

This is a non-fiction book about Black women in America, intended as an inspiration for today's Black women. It's arranged in roughly chronological chapters, starting before the area was a significant destination for the slave trade. Each chapter contains a few vignettes of significant Black women, and/or important incidents in women's lives. There's also framing narrative discussing the period covered.

The main theme is that black women have always resisted, as well as figuring out how to make do with whatever limited chances they had. Resistance isn't new, and isn't all male either.

In the early chapters it felt much like other books I've encountered, which seemed intended to counter claims of unimportance and/or nonexistence by producing a bunch of names and dates. You see people like the first known black woman poet in the Americas. (Yes, black women did write poetry even back then.) This is presumably a useful corrective, for those who never encountered any such people in their history books, and hence presume they didn't exist. But I'm doubly not the target audience - I'm aware of the selectivity of capital-H History, and I'm not a black youngster seeking role models and a sense of possibility.

Later chapters were more selective, there being more material available, and inclined to point out conflicts and contradictions within resistance movements. (There was a lot to say about a period when many Black men, prominent in resistance to white oppression of blacks, felt that Black liberation required Black men to utterly rule over Black women.) There was some interesting detail there, that was new to me. Also, some of the mostly Black people mentioned overlapped with my lifetime, and I sometimes had picked up up rather different impressions of them.

I think it's a good book, but a better one for its target audience than for a white immigrant to the United States such as myself.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: female, American (black), born ??? (graduated with BA in 1992), academic (history), new to me
- Author: female, American (black), born ???, academic (history), new to me
- English, public library, 273 pages, read May 31-June 11, 3.5 stars

I've been making progress on my book sorting and cataloguing. I had to move most of my fiction books, to make space in a sensible way. (Some of the fiction paperbooks are now double shelved, freeing space for larger books elsewhere.) That made space for all my cookbooks, or at least all I could find. Then I started gathering my bridge books.

It turned out that I had a lot more than I knew I had, including one duplicate, and several with bookmarks partway, sitting in a TBR shelf in my bedroom, complete with enough dust to prove I'm a lousy housekeeper.

I've catalogued most of them, but haven't so far found a good place to make a section for them; a few are too tall for many of my shelves, and the cookbooks got the last available tall-enough shelf. (My shelf heights are adjustable, and I could make another tall-enough shelf, but only by reducing a different deep shelf to only be tall enough for paperbacks.) Currently the bridge books are partly shelved with cookbooks, and partly with paperback fiction, except those sitting on my desk waiting to be catalogued.

I'd like to get all the various stacks into shelves, and sorted by category, but there are also plenty already shelved but not catalogued, and cataloguing them - the way I do it, using "collection" to indicate approximate location - would make them a lot easier to locate.

Meanwhile, I need to decide how to report books I finally read this year, after partly reading them in some previous year. (In most cases, restarting from the beginning, since I don't remember very much.) Perhaps they'll get their own list in post 3, or in my reserved post 5 upthread. and perhaps I'll learn from this, and have a simpler system next year.

48. Terminal Uprising by Jim C. Hines

This science fiction novel continues a hilarious series with a somewhat serious premise. Our viewpoint characters are mostly a group of human janitors, who used to work for the alien species which had found a partial cure for the alien plague which had reduced humans to mindlessly violent non-sapients incapable of feeling pain. "Cured" humans still can't feel pain, are supposedly less intelligent than their ancestors, and are very useful as super soldiers in a seemingly unending war. They also do other work, including acting as janitors on warships.

In the prior novel, after a related toxin got loose on the warship they crewed, the janitorial crew were almost the sole survivors - having been wearing environmental suits at the time the toxin got loose. In dealing with the issue, they also found evidence that the plague had been caused by the same alien species which had cured them. They took over the ship, offloaded survivors, and went off to investigate - predictably drawing the wrath of almost the whole navy on them as mutineers. But they also found enough evidence to convince them of both the source of the plague and an extreme coverup.

In this novel, they chase leads back to earth, picking up a member of the enemy species along the way. Many things on earth are not as they expected. Various adventures and conflicts ensue, with plenty of humour in most of them. All turns out well in the end, except that the admiral who had given them covert support all along asks them to investigate another problem, presumably in the third volume of this series, expected to be released on August 9 of this year.

This book was a lot of fun to read. While I expected a happy ending, as with any comedy, there was a lot of suspense, and a lot of twisty turns in plot and tactics along the way. I'd gleefully describe a few of them, except that I don't want this review to include spoilers.

Four stars rather than five because of a bit too much implausibility, and this volume being just a tad less funny than its predecessor, which I'd rated at 4.5 when I read it in 2018.

Statistics:
- Fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2019
- Author: male, American, born 1974, novelist, first time read this year
- English, public library, 324 pages, read June 10-15, 4 stars

49. The Genome Odyssey: Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them by Euan Angus Ashley

This book discusses the use of gene sequencing in medical diagnosis and personalized medicine, primarily as a series of representative anecdotes. The author is an MD/PhD, a professor at Stanford, and a principle in attempts to commercialize this technology.

It's quite a good book, but could be better.

I'd prefer less in the way of descriptions of individual patients, not to mention individual researchers - but that's the direction science writing is moving. (The target audience, it seems to be presumed, requires that the bitter pill of science and technology be wrapped in a candy coating consisting of personalization.)

I'd also prefer more in the way of consideration of how this technology could be misused - and to some extent, already has been abused. (E.g. how long before US health insurance companies demand genome data, and then refuse to insure those with known risk factors?

All in all though, the author tells a good story. And it's a story worth knowing about, in a field that continues to advance at breakneck speed. I recommend this book to any one who likes science books for the general reader, particularly those about medicine.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, medicine, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, British, age unknown (thesis in 2002), academic (medicine, genetics)/medical doctor
- English, public library, 380 pages, read June 8-19, 4 stars

This morning I have an errand that rather makes me feel my age: annual hearing test and possible adjustment of my hearing aids.

You now all know why I prefer traditional books to audio books.

It's a lazy morning, so I went hunting for penguins. https://www.librarything.com/hunt.php?y=2022&m=06

I got three out of twelve, without too much effort, and a reminder of my own age - Rubyfruit Jungle turning up on a list of older books. I think of its author, Rita Mae Brown as somewhat of a contemporary, certainly someone still actively writing (in fact she was born just a tad more than 13 years before me).

Louis Leakey always claimed that baboons rose up on their hind legs to see leopard approaching over the high grass.
And so bipedalism began in primates.

I'm going to have to get a copy of your book just to see another opinion.

>77 ArlieS: She published it in 1973, which is 49 years ago. How the heck a year I was in junior high came to be 49 years ago I do not know.

>79 richardderus: I'm just a smidge older than you - I started college, somewhat early, in the fall of 1973. (But if it was published in 1973, what is it doing in a list of pre-1969 LGBTQ literature?https://www.librarything.com/list/43639/all/Pre-1969-LGBTQ-Literature)

p.s. You have 9 days to get me reading a gay male romance during pride month ;)

OTOH, if you count fantasy novels with gay male protagonists who fall in love and/or lust, that ship sailed decades ago.

>77 ArlieS: & >79 richardderus: I read it in the early 1980s and that is already forty years ago!

50. Breath taking : the power, fragility, and future of our extraordinary lungs by Michael J. Stephen

This book is about breath, lungs, lung ailments, and medical process in treating them. It's very much humanized by stories about the people involved, as well as clearly focussed on the the specific work done by the author, who is a medical doctor and associate professor. The last part is primarily about cystic fibrosis- the author is director of the Adult Cystic Fibrosis Center.

I found it interesting, and not marred by the individual human experience stories, which I usually find detract from the science and/or technology discussed.

Four stars.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, medicine, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, American, age unknown (1st residency 2001-2004), medical doctor/academic
- English, public library, 380 pages, read June 13-23, 4 stars

>80 ArlieS: We do count fantasy novels with inlovegefalling. You are absolved. If, however, you'd like a good espionage novel set in 1920s London with a solid m/m couple leading it, Slippery Creatures will fix you right up for $4 on Kindle. I love Will and Kim, the guys leading it!

Rita Mae Brown counts for pre-1969 because it's set in the late 1960s.

Wow! I'm 2/3 of the way to my goal of 75, and not yet halfway through the time allotted.

This is of course nothing compared to people who've already completed 3 times 75 books, or more. But it's good enough for me.

I'm also progressing on cataloguing the non-fiction books on my shelves, in spite of the recent beastly hot weather. I'm getting some totally useless recommendations, as I catalog books acquired in my twenties, and probably unread since my thirties. I don't expect to care much about similar books published since that time; in fact, I've already flagged some of these books for de-acquisition.

What I haven't done is update my reading totals for the year, in post 4, which I apparently last updated 20 books and almost 2 months ago.

I've also been just a bit lax on library visits; today I dropped off a book that was one day overdue, without the excuse of having needed one more day to finish it. It was just too hot out for me to find the motivation to make a special trip just to drop it off yesterday, after failing to bring it along on my drive to the dentist. (On the good side, today's visit was while the library was open, so I borrowed another book from their new fiction shelf. I hope it's decent - the author is reliably unreliable, i.e. I never know what I'll get from him ;-( And I *never* buy anything of his without reading it first.)

>83 richardderus: Duly added to the black hole.

>84 ArlieS: Yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at. I’ll never keep up with some of the folks here, but definitely an improvement over the last couple of years.

>84 ArlieS: Exactly, Arlie. We have to go at our own pace (even though my own is so irregular), but I cannot help but being in awe of some of our compadres that are already over 150 books.

Have a lovely weekend.

51. Two-Over-One Game Force: An Introduction by Steve Bruno and Max Hardy

This book had been sitting in the house unread since late in 2008 - 13 1/2 years. I came upon a cache of unread and partly read bridge books while sorting and cataloging, and decided to give them some love.

This is a book for people who already play bridge, and most likely play duplicate bridge in particular. (That would be me.) It won't teach you how to play, and even if you know how to play it won't be useful without some experience.

It teaches a particular bidding system called "two over one", that started out being used by highly competitive expert players, and has since been adopted by less and less competitive players, to the point where more than half of those I play against are using it, and people are teaching it to outright beginners.

Thirteen or so years ago, people were already playing it against me, and I decided I should maybe learn a bit about it; this book, and two others, wound up on a physical TBR shelf, and sat there until I retired, and found time to work on improving my bridge, not merely play it. (I'm also playing a lot more of it than I did pre-retirement. It's an almost perfect retirement hobby.)

This book is OK, but nowhere near as good as some other bridge books I've got on my shelves. Part of the problem is due to the copyright date - 1993. It's teaching presuming everyone knows a common system, that was probably current in 1993 - but that system had changed in a lot of ways by the time I learned it - so what the authors are presuming is similar but not identical to what I know. But I don't think that's all; some people simply write better than others, and do better at organizing material for learners; these authors are adequate, but not especially good.

Three stars, and I'm looking forward to reading the next of the three books on two-over-one I have on my shelves, and finding out whether it does better. At this point, I know a bit more about why my opponents are making the bids they are, and what they can't easily communicate, but nowhere near enough to play two over one myself.

- non-fiction, games, series: n/a, 1993
- Author 1: male, American, age unknown, bridge pro + day job
- Author 2: male, American, age unknown, bridge pro
- English, TBR shelf (purchased 2008), 141 pages, read June 16-27, 3 stars

Lordie I learned bridge in the 1970's with four card majors and had a tremendous wrench when everybody went to five card majors instead.

and how many point to open No Trump? Keeps changing ever changing.

Keeps you young I guess.

>89 magicians_nephew: It either keeps you young or makes you crazy. Maybe both at once ;-)

IIRC, I was playing 4 card majors in the office lunchroom early in the current century, though not for long. (The book several of us learnt from taught a 4 card major system, though it had a chapter at the end talking about 5 card major systems.) But we all moved to 5 card majors soon after that, even though we didn't have any beginner books that did as good a job with 5 card majors.

52. Ageless : the new science of getting older without getting old by Andrew Steele

Every once in a while on a trip to the library my housemate hands me a book. They are never something I'd have selected for myself, but I pretty much always check them out, and usually appreciate them. This is one of those books.

I gave it four stars, but realistically speaking it had 3 major sections: one good but flawed, one excellent, and one trite, hackneyed, and probably wrong. It also has an IMO insane wish-fulfillment premise.

The purpose of this book is to popularize the idea that if humanity put more effort and money into research, many people now young adults might survive indefinitely, in reasonable health, with no more chance of dying in their 100th or 200th year than in their 20th.

IMNSHO this is crackpot territory, or at least extreme wishful thinking. I've known a lot of people with this belief, and IMO, the belief is primarily the result of fear of aging and death, and is usually seen among "spoiled brats" - i.e. people who've been near the top of the human status hierarchy in many parts of their lives. It's particularly common among tech billionaires, along with two other implausible beliefs - the idea that if their corpse is flash frozen, they'll eventually be restored to life, and the idea that their "self" can be uploaded to the Cloud, granting them conscious immortality there.

So why do I like it? Because the middle section is the best discussion of aging and related research, intelligible to laypeople, that I have ever seen. It has footnotes that include links to much of the source material, on a web site lovingly maintained by the author. It's full of optimism, but not to the point of idiocy - when an approach was tried and failed, it says so. And when some approach has only been tried in mice - or worse, in earthworms - it makes clear that this only means that it might be worth a try, not that we should expect it to work in humans. And this section is more than half the book.

Every once in a while, it becomes screamingly obvious that the author is a science writer, not a scientist. He makes fewer errors than most science writers - a breed I generally avoid - but he's made a few that stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. (OTOH, I've seen worse in medical journals, though not often.)

This book starts with a discussion of why living beings age - i.e. their health degrades as they get older - how much it varies between species, and evolutionary models for why all these different pattens might evolve. Good discussion, but he never mentions menopause, which invalidates some theories of aging just by existing. (These would be theories he described as having been generally rejected - but it's still weird not to have menopause mentioned.)

The middle part is all kinds of detail about various aspects of aging, and the research on them, including attempts to find ways of slowing or reversing them. This section is great (see above), though my knowledge isn't deep enough to know what ideas and data he failed to include, and whether that matters. This section rates 4 1/2 or even 5.

The last two sections are, IMO, made of fail. One talks about how we could all live forever if we put enough money into research. In the course of this he falls headlong into a stupid but common fallacy. If you find a measure that correlates with longevity - some kind of indicator of life expectancy more accurate than chronological age - there's no longer any need to wait the decades for realistic human trials - just look at changes of this measure before and after some intervention. Because of course the measure will continue to be accurate when clever people start working hard to improve the measure, without looking to see if it still reliably measures their actual goal. Managers commit this fallacy daily - and find that their staff can and do teach to the test (metaphorically speaking); they get lots and lots of a behaviour that used to go along with what they really want (but can't easily measure), and no more of what they wanted.

The other gives advice about how to increase your odds of being one of those who lives long enough to receive the new treatments. That's the same old, same old advice everyone gives, plus a few things outside of anyone's control. (e.g. "be female"). The one thing he may be doing right here is downplaying supplements. In the middle section he refers to a meta-study that basically concludes that statistically speaking most supplements have no net effect on life expectancy, with a handful having a negative effect. (Don't take vitamin A; taking the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene may also have a negative effect, but if so it's much smaller. Vitamin E also may have a net negative effect.)

Finally, I note that he seems to see his old people, pre-indefinitely-postponed frailty, having the same life styles as young adults. Of course he's forgotten menopause again; if that's partly governed by a limited supply of ova, it will be even less possible for women to delay child-bearing to the point where they are advanced enough in their careers to afford full time care, etc.

At any rate, the combination of the two big goofs and the implausible premise leaves me unconvinced by his arguments about how easy this could be. Read this book with cynic-glasses, not rose-tinted ones. (Be warned he's a quite persuasive writer.) But the book is still a great source of information, all in one place, and easily intelligible to lay people. Recommended.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: male, British, age unknown, science writer
- English, public library, 334 pages, read June 20-29, 4 stars

53. A call to insurrection : a novel of the Honorverse by David Weber, Timothy Zahn and Thomas Pope

David Weber is a "read on sight" author for me, and I particularly love all the various branches of his Honorverse series, so I grabbed this science fiction novel as soon as I saw it on the new books shelves at my local library. It did not disappoint.

That said, it's far too plainly a novel published in the last decade. There are three plots taking place in interleaved chapters, and I regularly found myself interrupted while intent on one of them. Sure, the plots involved people who knew each other, and spend some time in the same place. Two of the plots are even related, though the third seems not to be. But I'd still rather have read two or three separate novellas, than one book bouncing between 3 plots.

One of the plots - the main one, in the sense that it's an ongoing plot throughout this sub-series - also bounces between viewpoint characters working against each other. That's typical of the whole series - David Weber likes to show opponents as people, often as good people doing the best they can in situations of conflict. He started that in earlier books with sympathetic depictions of officers on both sides of the same war. Now we also have amoral conspirators depicted sympathetically, complete with signs of personal growth. We also have a mercenary leader whose life has been shaped by her hatred of a man who, it turns out, did not in fact murder her mother.

This subseries shows the future Manticoran Empire as a relative backwater, surrounded by stronger neighbours. High technology is generally imported, or done without; there's a lot they can't make themselves, or can't make economically. This inequality is very much on display in the current book, when a powerful neighbour sends a mission to set up diplomatic relations, and the Manticorans fall all over themselves to eagerly accept. This is lots of fun, given the future that's already been written.

Overall, the book delivered what I expect from novels in the Honorverse - a mix of space combat, undercover work, and a look at a potential future spacegoing society. I'd cheerfully read a sequel on the spot, if there were one available. Sadly, with this one coming out in 2022, I expect I'll have to wait a while.

Statistics:
- Fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2022
- Author 1: male, American, born 1952, novelist, already read this year
- Author 2: male, American, born 1951, novelist, first time read this year
- Author 3: male, American, born ???, novelist, first time read this year
- English, public library, 370 pages, read June 24-29, 4 stars

I read several Honor Harrington novels back in the day & lost track of it. Looks like a sprawling beast with offshoots. Tempting to dip my toe back into it...

>91 ArlieS: might make the cut. Neither of the others has any curb appeal to me. But I'm totally in your corner re: reading volume because it has to be what works for you. You're already parsecs ahead of the bulk of people, and your lifetime list is *immense* so....

>91 ArlieS: Agree with RD, Arlie, in that that one looks worth looking at.

I have once again achieved the improbable - I'm completely caught up on all the threads I have starred.

>93 ChrisG1: Come on in, the water's fine.

54. Fairhaven rising by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

This is a fantasy novel by another prolific author who is read-on-sight for me. This series (Recluce Saga) has a fairly consistent and somewhat unique magic system, and his various novels in the series take place over a span of hundreds or maybe thousands of years, all over his world. It's notable that his books may show the same nation and its customs from inside and outside, or both early in its development and after its eventual collapse. Thus you get sympathetic and viciously unsympathetic looks at the same place, people, and customs. Sometimes, though rarely, the reader even sees the same events occurring from far distant viewpoints; far more commonly, we see them as (generally inaccurate) history or legend in one book, and as they actually occurred in another.

There are other commonalities in these novels. Many are variants on a common plot: young person with magic talents, often in some ways a misfit in their society, successfully deals with a sea of troubles, coming of age in the process. Usually the sea of troubles involves politics, international conflict, oppressive customs, or similar. Often there's a need to discover effective uses of that particular individual's magic talents. Usually the protagonist is idealistic, and tries to set up something that will make the future world better. Often we see that something again, in another novel set 100s of years later, as the oppressive institution causing a new protagonist's problems.

This formula is not followed universally, or consistently, and few of the novels have all these elements. In this one, the protagonist has supportive family, and a society that both seems fair to her and suits her talents and inclinations. Unfortunately, her society is a small part of a larger country, which is small and vulnerable with rapacious neighbours. So she winds up going to war as an arms mage - her sea of troubles coming almost entirely from the war, which must be won if she - or even her society - is to survive.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2021
- Author: male, American, born 1943, novelist (read in prior years)
- English, public library, 459 pages, read June 30-July 4, 4 stars

55. Killing floor by Lee Child (James Dover Grant)

This is the first of a long series about a really large, tough ex-military guy named Jack Reacher, who travels around the United States, mostly following his whims, and regularly stumbles upon wrongdoers. If they attack someone he cares about, or annoy him enough, he deals with them, often in a permanent fashion.

In a discussion of the Honor Harrington series, richarderrus told me that someone else had described Honor Harrington as "Jack Reacher with a womb", and that he (Richard) rather agreed with them. Since I love those novels, I immediately added the first of these "Honor Harrington with testicles" novels to my TBR list. This is that book.

After reading Killing Floor I don't think Jack Reacher is very much like Honor Harrington. She's much more disciplined and law abiding, and almost never commits illegal violence. (Of course she's in the military; plenty of violence gets committed upon her nation's enemies.) She's less of a loner, and so far, more of a leader. And she has - and cultivates - ties of both family and friendship. Both are larger than life, super competent, dangerous to anyone who attacks them. But that's about it.

But even though Jack doesn't seem much like Honor to me, I enjoyed this book, and plan to read more of the series. Jack solves mysteries and defeats evildoers with enjoyable effectiveness, and without making everything so trivially easy as to be boring. The plot was clever, and included several early mistakes on the part of Jack and those he winds up working with, one of which comes close to getting them all killed. It was a wee bit gorier than I'd prefer, and there were implausibly many close calls without Jack ever getting significantly injured, but this is normal for thrillers. (I'd have classed this book as an unusually violent mystery, rather than a thriller, but the author's web site says he's a thriller writer.)

Recommended if you like this sort of thing, and particularly if you like your mystery stories without a side order of personal angst. (I'm not a fan of depressed detectives, self medicating with alcohol after their wife or girl friend made them chose between the job and her. Or washed up has-been police officers confronting aging. Or a whole batch of other common tropes of this kind.)

Statistics:
- fiction, mystery (thriller), first of a series, 1997
- Author: male, British, born 1954, novelist (new to me)
- English, public library, 550 pages, read June 16-July 4, 3.5 stars

We're visiting the more distant of our local library systems today, to return one book due today, and collect two of my holds. There should be three holds, but some computer glitch caused the third hold to disappear from their system; it's possible it was user error, accidentally putting a hold on the e-book rather than the real one, leading to no notification it was ready, and the hold being cancelled after a day or two. (I saw it, briefly, as available but needing to be picked up by a date *before* the then current day.)

Fortunately (?) I also found that another book from that library, which I was just about to start, had a hold placed on it. It's due back on Friday (today being Tuesday), and won't be renewable because of the hold. This morning I read almost a third of the book; I'll be trying to finish it on or before Friday, rather than bringing it back today. Hopefully by Friday they'll have located the book involved in the messed up hold, and will have it available for me - or alternatively, I'll manage to locate it myself this afternoon.

Two other books aren't going back today, even though one is expected to be a DNF (with too few pages read to call it a Pearl rule ;-)) and the other, a later book in the same series, isn't likely to be started. With another trip to the same library coming up fairly soon, there doesn't seem much point in hurrying, and I'll have enough books I've already finished with me to make for a fairly heavy bag, even walking from parking to the library drop off.

In other news, I'll be getting my second covid booster before today's library trip. I'm predicting that I won't start feeling rotten until at least half a day after this shot, so the library run shouldn't be a problem.

56. 1177 B.C. : the year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline

This is a work of history and archaeology, arguing that the end of the Bronze Age was the collapse of significant parts of a globalized economy, which created a feedback loop causing farther state collapses, followed by a more insular (and poorer) system, until new powers arose in the Iron Age.

I found it somewhat hard to follow - just about every piece of this is contested, key details are missing from the archaeological record, and I spent a lot of time confused by a flood of names and locations not especially familiar to me. That's better than glossing over the weaknesses of the evidence, or not attributing theories to the scholars who originated them. But not by enough for me to give the book more than 3.5 stars, particularly as I wound up concluding "not proven" to the author's key point.

I'm not sure whether the book could have been re-written to improve it in my eyes; maybe the project was just too ambitious for a reader with my level of knowledge.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2014
- Author: male, American, born 1960, academic (classics and anthropology)
- English, public library, 237 pages, read June 30-July 5, 3.5 stars

>101 ArlieS: His main points are always going to be debated. Anything that happened 3,100+ years ago isn't knowable outside a significant error bar, including volcanic eruptions and so on.

His arguments do make sense of a weird event, and that's all I think he meant to do.

I haven’t read that one yet, but it’s on my Overdrive wishlist. Looks like I need to read it, but with the appropriate grain of salt.

57. Uprooted by Naomi Novik

This was a fun fantasy novel, particularly the beginning where there's a lot of world-building, and description of events from a somewhat confused protagonist. Once she gets her feet underneath her, it's a more traditional "budding mage needs to learn fast, because a terrible crisis is on the way".

The author subverts the trope somewhat - after combat fails, the eventual solution involves bringing peace and forgiveness, in a magical kind of way, to a previously implacable adversary. And after the joint victory the commitment-shy (male, more experienced) mage who'd become the heroine's love interest promptly runs away, citing urgent work he needs to do in the capital city. (She settles down to handle the leftover damage, rather than pursuing him.)

Overall, a good example of its genre, with enough unique to keep me un-bored with world and theme, and enough surprises to keep me interested in the plot. Read it if you like this kind of fantasy novel.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, non-series, 2015
- Author: female, American, born 1973, novelist and computer programmer, already read this year
- English, public library, 438 pages, July 5-7, 4 stars

>104 ArlieS: I liked that one, glad you did too! I'm still getting around to the not-a-sequel, Spinning Silver

58. The better part of valor by Tanya Huff

This marines-in-space novel is the sequel to my book #39 for this year. I purchased it, and the two following volumes, from a second hand bookstore, almost as soon as I'd finished book #39. It took me a while to start, and even longer to finish, only because I was giving priority to borrowed books which needed to be returned ASAP.

This time, our staff sergeant heroine is assigned to a notorious glory-hound officer, equally notorious for getting his soldiers killed, who's nonetheless being pushed towards farther promotion and fame for political reasons. To make her life still more interesting, the team is made up of individuals brought together for the mission, in the hopes that moving individual marines - rather than complete squads, or even fireteams - will keep the newsies from noticing there's something going on. (This does not work; the newsies show up in plenty of time to get in everyone's way, and farther politicize the mission.)

The mission proves to be more than a little bit strange, originally involving protecting scientists exploring an alien ship - until, of course, everything goes sideways. I don't want to explain just how sideways, because of spoilers. But the bulk of the book is devoted to dealing with the various surprises, while also neutralizing the political insanity.

Overall, a fun read, though not quite as surprising as the first book of the series.

Statistics:
- Fiction, science fiction, first of a series, 2002
- Author: female, Canadian, born 1957, novelist, already read this year
- English, purchased used, 411 pages, read June 9-July 12, 4 stars

59. The witness for the dead by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette)

I enjoyed this fantasy novel, and will be looking for both of the other books in the series.

The protagonist is a cleric with the ability to speak with the recently dead, unpopular with his local hierarchy, and uncaring of his own well being due to depression or perhaps a sense of duty. His duties include attempting to find out what the dead remember, if requested by the living (many would rather not know); attempting to identify corpses, investigating murders; and putting down ghouls.

His society has a mix of humanoid races (goblins, elves, mixed breeds), a mix of religious practices, and the beginnings of industrialization. It also features extreme formal politeness, and lots and lots of tea shops, serving many varieties of tea. Plus the usual mix of human beings, regardless of sub-type: venal, honorable, selfish, self-sacrificing, over-confident, political, and obsessed with their work.

We see the society gradually revealed, as we follow the protagonist first through his daily routine, and then through various non-routine events. There's a satisfying story, which emerges gradually out of the daily routine.

This book is quite unusual for fiction published in this decade; there's exactly one viewpoint character. I'm very pleased by this, and was quite surprised to find it was published in 2021 rather than e.g. 2001. I may decide to look for all this author's books, not just the ones written under this pseudonym.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, first I've read of a series (it's simultaneously in 2 series, and is first of one of them), 2021
- Author: female, American, born 1974, novelist, new author for me
- English, public library, 232 pages, read July 9-14, 4 stars

>107 ArlieS: I assume you haven't read The Goblin Emperor yet? I wish I could read it again for the first time (it's much longer but also features only one viewpoint character).

I couldn't get into the author's Doctrine of Labyrinths series (Mélusine, etc.) but I did like her Iskryne series co-written with Elizabeth Bear. I haven't read The Angel of the Crows yet.

>108 kgodey: The Goblin Emperor will hopefully be next, if I can find it.

(Edited to add: neither local library has it. I had to resort to an inter-library loan request.)

+1 for ooh, you're going to love The Goblin Emperor

I haven't read Witness for the Dead yet, and have to fix that.

60. The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

This collaboration between an anthropologist and and archaeologist rejects the traditional stages of civilization, and offers an alternative, more nuanced view. It also rejects the dichotomy between Rousseau and Hobbes - humans as naturally good or naturally evil.

Rejecting those models isn't difficult - professionals in the relevant fields don't take them seriously any more. But alternatives have been in short supply, so they creep back into discussions of pre-history, simply for lack of alternative models. They are also implicit in everything from the naming of (pre-) historical stages to modern political discourse.

The body of the book looks at evidence from archaeology and history, particularly signs of urban humans organizing themselves without any kind of coercive authority. It also looks at critiques from non-Europeans of European settler culture - in particular, critiques by aboriginal people from the eastern woodlands of North America. (The old fashioned names for these peoples would be Huron and Iroquois; those terms are no longer used modern scholars, as having been used about these peoples rather than by them, but are most likely the only names my readers will recognize.) It also relates some of the history of (Western) ideas about the social organization of non-Westerners.

Their basic point is that there are a lot of ways to organize societies, human beings have tried most of them, and many of them have worked well for a time, sometimes a very long time. Moreover, this is true even if you look only at cultures which included city dwellers. At least one of the authors identified as an anarchist, so has the not at all hidden agenda of showing that anarchic (or at least, non-command) social organizations can work, even in urban societies.

There's also much discussion of "the three elementary forms of domination - control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power" (p. 413), potentially institutionalized as sovereignty, administration (bureaucracy), and heroic politics respectively. They describe these as showing up time and again, crystallizing into institutions either alone, in pairs, or all together, with all three required for a full fledged state.

It's a great book. I wish I still had the kind of memory I had in my youth, where a much larger proportion of these new-to-me details would have stuck in my head; now all my mind tends to record is "this list of truisms are contested; see Graeber and Wengrow". Even without the memory skills to remember all the detail, I'm glad I read it, and hope to read enough more elsewhere about some of their examples that the details will eventually stick in my memory.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history (and pre-history, and anthropology), series: n/a, 2021
- Author 1: male, American, born 1961, academic (anthropology), first time read this year
- Author 2: male, British, born 1972, academic (archaeology), new to me
- English, public library, 692 pages, read July 7-18, 4 stars

>111 ArlieS: Looks like a good one. Onto the list it goes...

I need to get to The Goblin Emperor! I don't think I've seen anyone who hasn't loved it.

61. Brief History of Timekeeping : The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks by Chad Orzel

This is a pretty decent book about the history of timekeeping, and the physics involved in creating ever more accurate calendars and clocks. In some ways, the subject of timekeeping is used as an excuse to teach the physics, though very much at a popular level (few or no equations in sight). But the history isn't slighted.

I should probably have given it a rating of 4, maybe more, if rating in terms of the target audience. It lost at least half a star simply because there was little in here that was unfamiliar to me, and there was a time when I knew the relevant equations for most of the physics here. (I never quite assimilated general relativity, and appreciated the metaphors used to explain it here, which were new to me. But the rest of the physics was familiar from classes more than forty years ago.)

I was interested enough in the author, who seems to specialize in this kind of science popularization, to subscribe to his blog, though that's not a very high bar - I drop at least 50% of those I subscribe to.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science (physics), series: n/a, 2022
- Author: male, American, age unknown, academic (physics), new to me
- English, public library, 324 pages, read July 11-24, 3.5 stars

Skimmed book #5: The Complete Instant Pot Collection: 175 Quick, Easy & Delicious Recipes by Weldon Owen

I grabbed this cookbook in passing when I noticed it while picking up other books at the library, since I'm still looking for more Instant Pot books and recipes.

This book failed to make the cut.

My biggest problem is that it contains a lot of air fryer recipes, and doesn't advertise this on e.g. the title page. There also isn't a quick summary with each recipe, showing the technique(s) used. This wouldn't be a problem, if all Instant Pots included an air fryer - but they do not. In particular, mine does not.

It's also fonder of pot-in-pot recipes than I am, and a bit too prone to using the instant pot to prepare things which would be equally fast and easy conventionally.

Mostly, though, of the 175 recipes in here, I only found one worth making: that was a recipe for minestrone, and it was very tasty. (For the record, I did take some liberties with the ingredients, since I didn't have the precise list they specified, and the recipe suggested ways to substitute.) No other recipes grabbed me.

Obviously, another cook's mileage may vary, particularly if they have a model with an air fryer. But I won't be buying my own copy of this one.

FWIW, when I added the book by ISBN, I was offered the following title: The Complete Instant Pot Collection: 175 Quick, Easy & Delicious Recipes (Fan favorites, Instant Pot air fryer recipes). If the text in parentheses had been on the cover, or even on the title page, I wouldn't have borrowed this book, but I also wouldn't have been annoyed about the many air fryer recipes.

>108 kgodey: >110 swynn: >113 curioussquared: My inter-library loan came in, and I started The Goblin Emperor this morning. So far, it's excellent.

62. A question of honor : a Bess Crawford Mystery by Charles Todd (pen name of a 2 author team: Caroline Watjen and David Watjen)

This novel is a mystery story set in WWI, partly in England and partly near the front lines. The protagonist is a British nurse, raised in India. She gets the first hint of something amiss from a dying soldier, and gradually over the course of many leaves, mostly in England, and quite a few chance encounters, puts together a complex story.

It was a fun read, keeping my attention, but not really more than a light snack. I turned off my reality-checking functions early on, so can't even say how (im)plausible a picture it painted of World War I Britain and France. There were, however, a few too many coincidences - information and evidence too often falls into the protagonist's lap.

I read this book because of a LibraryThing recommendation for one of the later books in the series. When I get recommendations like that, I generally start with the first book of the series, but this book (the fifth) was the earliest one I could find in my local libraries.

Statistics:
- Fiction, mystery (with historical setting), first I've read of a series (but not first book of the series), 2013
- Author 1: female, American, born 1934 or 1935, novelist(?), new author for me
- Author 2: male, American, son of first author, novelist(?), new author for me
- English, public library, 309 pages, read July 25-28, 3.5 stars

>115 ArlieS: I also resent the elision of important information from obvious places it belongs.

>114 ArlieS: I enjoyed Orzel's Eureka: Discover Your Inner Scientist. He's about my speed...equations equal abandonment in my schema of the world.

Enjoy your weekend's reads.

63. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette)

This fantasy novel is in the same series as my #59 for the year, and takes place earlier. I'd have read this one first, but neither local library had it, so started with the second volume in this world. I liked the second volume so much that I immediately requested this one via inter library loan. I also put a hold on the third book of the series, which the library had on order, and have just been informed that it's available for me to pick up.

I'm having trouble describing why I like both novels so much, and this one in particular, without spraying spoilers in all directions, and plagiarizing comments (or at least ideas) from other people's reviews.

I like the main character - a lot. I like his attitude to new-found responsibilities. I like his willingness to break with tradition, but only when it makes sense.

I'm also very happy that there's a single viewpoint character, and the action doesn't jump from person and place to place.

The world this book is set within seems less polished than it does in The Witness for the Dead. But that's OK, because this novel is more about the viewpoint character as a person and about his experiences, and less about his environment. The book itself also seems a bit less polished - I see spots that don't seem to quite connect plausibly enough. But that's OK, because it keeps the book down to a reasonable size, and keeps the reading experience cosy.

I like the book's overall gentleness. Given the starting set up, I expected a lot more violence, and a lot fewer basically good people doing the right thing, and prevailing in spite of those who chose to do otherwise.

Overall, it's very much worth reading. Strong recommend.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, series (already read a later member of the series), 2014
- Author: female, American, born 1974, novelist, author already read this year
- English, public library, 446 pages, read July 24-30, 4 stars

I was very productive this weekend, but not with reading. Now that I'm retired, I've made a goal of reducing the chaos and clutter in my house.

Thanks to the magic of FreeCycle (http://www.freecycle.org) we are now no longer storing 8 jigsaw puzzles we didn't want to redo, 2 large out-of-date (but working) computer monitors, and one KVM switch. The dog crate will be picked up tomorrow.

A surprising number of dead lightbulbs turned out, when I checked, not to require special treatment; they went into the regular trash. Those that do need special treatment will go to the "Smart Station" when I got a reasonable car load of this sort of junk. We're also accumulating large objects that won't fit in the trash can, that the city is willing to pick up if you call them (there's a fee per pickup, so we won't call until our load is the maximum size they'll take at a time, or we've stopped finding things).

I found an almost full box of books labelled as "to be discarded". They will probably be donated to the library book sale, since there are no used book stores nearby. These are a mix of wretched junk and decent books where I'd somehow acquired duplicate copies. I entered all the non-duplicates into LibraryThing yesterday, in a collection not used for recommendations; this will help prevent me from accidentally re-acquiring them, and will completely prevent them being recommended to me by LibraryThing. (I'm sure anyone looking at my recent additions will wonder what kind of idjit collects such rotten books, unless they notice the name of the collection ;-)) Then I added two more books to the box. There will be more.

Today I planned to take a day off home organization and read, but I'm already feeling tired of sitting in this chair, so that may not happen. Sadly, I fear it's already too hot out to take the walk my body would otherwise appreciate. But sorting through junk can be great exercise too ;-)

>111 ArlieS: I went to add The Dawn of Everything to my TBR list, only to discover it was already there, apparently because it appeared on Kirkus's best books of the year. I'll have to bump it up.

>121 swynn: It's nice when a book get recommended by multiple sources - less chance that one of them doesn't really share one's tastes all that well.

64. American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

This book attempts to describe United States history in terms of 11 groups divided by their origins, and the areas they settled. Many of these groups exist outside the US and a few are significantly more prominent in Canada or Mexico, but coverage of those countries is shallow enough that I see the book as fundamentally about the United States.

The immediate comparison is David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. I loved that book, gave it a rating of 5, and bought just about everything else I could find by its author, who remains read-on-sight for me.

American Nations is decent, and I gave it a rating of 4, but that's all. I won't be buying my own copy, and I won't eagerly pursue the author's other works, though I certainly won't actively avoid them.

I like the idea of looking into North America's founding subcultures in more detail. I like the idea of including sub-cultures from other parts of the continent. Some of the additional cultures described here provided me with information I lacked.

I also liked the early history, particularly the hundred years on either side of the US revolution. I learned things I hadn't known about political divisions at the time.

But as the book got closer to present times, it turned into yet another book on US politics. The standard red and blue tribes of modern US politics were described in terms of the subcultures they draw on for support - but the book mostly stopped talking about conflicts and differences between subcultures within a single tribe. The author did a bad job of concealing his own political preferences, and American readers on the other political side assured me he failed to display nuanced understanding of his opponents. And his coverage of Canada and Mexico was primarily in terms of potential effects on the US, either as models or as participants in continent-wide political reorganization.

In my opinion, many of my complaints are the result of personally preferring history and sociology to politics and journalism. The author is a journalist by profession, and it shows, though not as much as I've seen with other journalists turning their hands to book length works. If this is your jam, you may like it better than Fischer's more historical work.

OTOH, IIRC Fischer also has the advantage of being the kind of writer who it's a positive joy to read, regardless of what he's writing about, whereas Woodard is merely an ordinarily decent writer.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2011
- Author: male, American, born 1968, journalist (and writer of history), new to me
- English, public library, 371 pages, read July 21-Aug 4, 4 stars

65. Civilizations by Laurent Binet

Suppose that the Norse went much farther into North America, such that the people of Central America learned from them to use iron and horses, and defeated Columbus when he arrived. Later both the Incas and the Aztecs reached Europe during the religious wars between Protestants and Catholics; these invaders won many victories - of hearts and minds as well as military valor - and took political control over large areas, spreading their religions as they went, even while tolerating the various varieties of Christian.

This novel tells that story, first via a saga-like description of the determined Norse leader, then via journal entries imitating those of Spanish adventurers, and then via fictional historical works.

I enjoyed the choice of style, not to mention its execution, as well as the idea that the successful European invasion of the Americas was essentially contingent.

I loved how very different this was from most other recent fiction, in both style and substance.

Rated 4, with at least 1 point of that for novelty. I read far too much that is basically just a variant on a poplar theme, in both style and content.

(Note: I read this in English translation. I doubt the French original exists in any library near me.)

Statistics:
- Fiction, alternate history, non-series, 2019 (English translation copyright 2021)
- Author: male, French, born 1972, writer (not only novels), new to me
- English, public library, 310 pages, read July 29-Aug 7, 4 stars

I just received another reminder from Goodreads, offering me a chance to save information I apparently stored on their site, as they are "streamlining their service" by reducing what types of information users can associate with books they own.

One of my better decisions, back when I first checked out systems for inventorying my library, was to abandon Goodreads in favor of LibraryThing. IIRC, the deciding factor was that Goodreads didn't support inventorying books not currently in print. It wasn't just that I needed that functionality; I also took this as a clear sign that the purpose of Goodreads was to sell books. Being associated with Amazon (possibly not yet owned by them) was an additional reason to suspect their purpose. I very happily paid LibraryThing its one time fee (no longer charged) to increase the number of books I could record here beyond their initial try-it-out limit, and never looked back.

As for Goodreads, I'm not sure I could find either my user ID or password on their site, and that's just fine with me. (Maybe it's in my password safe...)

Just like Blogger after being subsumed by Google...leave it alone until some ill-defined time has passed, then stop supporting things that don't make you money.

Pearl rule #5: Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates

This is a World War II novel, featuring an air crew forced to land in occupied France attempting to avoid being captured and return to Britain. Not historical fiction; it was first published in 1944.

There's nothing wrong with the book; it just pretty consistently failed to grab me, even after 85 pages.

Pearl rule #6: Royal blood by Rhys Bowen

This historical mystery/spy story relies for humor on the protagonist making somewhat of a fool of herself. That kind of humour sets my teeth on edge. I abandoned it after only 9 pages, without even making sure this sort of scene was a regular occurrence rather than a one-of.

I'm also abandoning God Rest Ye, Royal Gentlemen, from the same author and series, which I'd borrowed at the same time - without even opening it.

>119 ArlieS: Already in the BlackHole or I would be adding it again!

>125 ArlieS: I very happily paid LibraryThing its one time fee The best money I ever spent! I used Good Reads for a while, but happily disposed of its services several years ago.

>127 ArlieS: >128 ArlieS: I hope your next reads prove to be more to your taste!

Have a wonderful Wednesday, Arlie!

>129 alcottacre: Thank you.

I have several books in flight that I'm liking much more.

You have a great Wednesday too, Stasia.

>123 ArlieS: Danial Boorstein's The Americans is pretty good at looking at the differences between each of the American colonies.

Different people coming over for different reasons made for different tribes really. Astonishing that they came together enough to beat the British

I joined LibraryThing in 2007, when Google tells me GoodReads existed but I assume hadn't hit its stride yet. When I finally learned about GoodReads, I scoffed because I assumed LT was better :) I did eventually start using GoodReads due to pressure from friends but I was always disappointed with its functionality aside from the pretty chart it makes at the end of the year of all the books you read in that year. I finally totally stopped using GoodReads when I discovered the BookRiot reading log spreadsheet, which is set up to produce all the fun charts and stats I could want at the end of the year :)

>132 curioussquared: Now I'm curious about the Book Riot thing - will have to check it out

>131 magicians_nephew: One more for the ever-growing TBR. Thank you.

>128 ArlieS: That is a pretty decisive no and no, Arlie! Haven't read anything by him and you are not making me hurry any!

Have a splendid Bowen free weekend.

>135 PaulCranswick: There must be people who like that style. Why else would anyone write that way?

66. The grief of stones by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette)

This was another very enjoyable installment in the fantasy series that provided my #63 and #59. I loved it, and wanted more; sadly, it was published this year, so I'll have to wait a while for a sequel, which of course might not ever be produced.

The only reason I rated it only a 4 is that I don't think any of the books in the series would be good for a re-read until I've mostly forgotten them. So I'm not racing out to buy my own copies.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2022
- Author: female, American, born 1974, novelist, author already read this year
- English, public library, 245 pages, read Aug 9-14, 4 stars

>137 ArlieS: I have at least one of Addison's books in the BlackHole, but no luck at finding any of hers at my local library. I am going to have to look further afield.

Have a wonderful Wednesday, Arlie!

I was beginning to think I might hit 75 this month, with the year only 2/3 finished. Then a game I liked announced that they were starting a new world. Reading slowed down, and I became hopelessly behind on most of the threads I follow.

If any of you happen to have time you have trouble filling ;-(, and like fairly complicated persistent world games, you could do worse than Haven and Hearth, at https://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/

But be prepared to have no real life for a while.

>139 ArlieS: I've been there -- my reading took a definite hit when I got really into Zelda Breath of the Wild :) I will refrain from clicking that link for the moment!

I became aware of a game called Subnautica, an alien-undersea world, that actually made me think about trying it out.

Then I remembered how much it hurts to "play" these sort of puzzle-solving games with my hand issues. Have you encountered this game before?

>141 richardderus: I haven't tried Subnautica, or even heard about it, but it looks kind of interesting.

>141 richardderus: I watched my husband play Subnautica on our PlayStation and enjoyed it a lot. I followed his progress more than I do with other games. It was very atmospheric.

67. The velvet rope economy : how inequality became big business by Nelson Schwartz

This is the third non-fiction book I've read this year about increasing inequality, and the most satisfying of the lot. It was recommended to me by alcottacre, after I expressed disappointment with one or both of the others

This book is about changing wealth and incomes per se, but about one particular consequence of this - the expansion of the number of domains where the (very) rich have an entirely different experience from everyone else, often completely separate from those consigned to steerage. It then explores the consequences of increasing separation, in terms of public policy, political positions, etc.

The author's approach is to first describe experiences in various domains for those willing to spend pots of money, and then describe the experiences of everyone else in the same domains. Both parts include discussion of how and when the gap between these experiences has increased.

These domains range from the relatively trivial to the incredibly important. I can't get excited about recreation - line-jumping for a price at amusement parks and similar; crazy prices and exclusive access at ball parks - the obvious answer is for those of us who are less valuable individually to vote with our feet and our pocketbooks, and let ball parks and Disney theme parks see how well things work with only the people paying large multiples of the base price.

My reaction to the increasing misery of air travel is similar. If the price of being even marginally comfortable these days is several times that of flying at all, perhaps the right answer is to drive, or not go at all. That's been my solution almost since 9/11, when air travel abruptly got significantly more unpleasant. When I discovered that I could pay to be exempted from much of the unpleasant security theater, I concluded that the "security" rules were nothing but an extra source of income, and that is a ploy I do not wish to reward.

On the other side of this, we have schools and medicine. It used to be that private schools were about making connections and demonstrating class, and not about conferring massive advantages in university admission. And public schools were adequate, not warehouses on the journey to social promotion, functional illiteracy, unemployment, and probably prison. Likewise, concierge doctors didn't exist, and there wasn't insane pressure for every other doctor to spend less time with each patient than is needed to do a decent job.

More importantly, there wasn't a large voting bloc which didn't send their children to inadequate public schools, and consequently didn't want their money spent on funding them. People didn't react to the idea of medicine for the poor as automatically taking away from their own chance of seeing a doctor in a timely manner.

Also, there was less overall separation. You encountered people different from you financially in the course of ordinary life. That probably kept them human-seeming to you, and deserving of fair treatment, not to mention assistance when things went wrong.

I am, however, failing to do the book justice - it had vivid word pictures for each example. I am just producing generalities.

What I don't recall it having was enough in the way of statistics to make an iron-clad case. Maybe other things moved in the opposite direction at the same time. Maybe there are more of the good examples, of how things could be/once were, and fewer of the bad ones, than you'd think after reading about so many bad ones. If I wanted to be certain, I'd reread, checking statistics closely, and then look for other statistics for other domains.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: male, American, birthdate unknown, journalist, new to me
- English, public library, 339 pages, read Aug 1-19, 4 stars

>139 ArlieS: I already have no real life, lol. I think I will pass on the game since I do not want to have less than no real life.

>144 ArlieS: I am glad that you read it and it was a 4 star book for you.

Have a super Saturday, Arlie!

>145 alcottacre: You have a great Saturday too!

Oh * g r o a n * Another bb. I'm blaming you, Arlie, and of course, Stasia.

>147 weird_O: She's dangerous. I'm just a humble apprentice.

>148 ArlieS: I suspect the Sorting Hat would put you in Biblio-Slytherin.

>143 kgodey:, >142 ArlieS: I have *never* felt this tempted to play an online game. It's fascinating and gorgeous.

(Hi Kriti!)

68. This broken world by Charles E. Gannon

When I saw this novel on the new books shelf at the library, I figured it could be very good, very bad, or anything in between. I describe the author as "reliably unreliable". He often contributes to other authors' series, without quite fitting their usual tone. But this book is the start of a series of his own.

It's got an interesting concept, but IMO fails to do it justice. Part of this is due to the decision to keep the reader as ignorant as the viewpoint character, which makes sense. But the viewpoint character is effectively on a quest, and we never get enough of his viewpoint to see what motivates him. We see each individual problem he tries to solve, but not the overall pattern that presumably drives his choice of problem - or rather, we don't see that until the end of the book, just as he's landed in new issues which will doubtless provide motivation for a second volume. Overall, the book reads like a later volume of a series, which doesn't quite stand alone for a reader without the earlier context - except in this case, there is no earlier volume.

That said, it's a basic adventure yarn, with a supremely competent hero, who we follow (with large gaps) from childhood onward. He lives in a complex society, in a complex world, that doesn't exactly follow any of the usual adventure tropes. Many secrets are being kept, and there's a sense in which none of the characters understand their world, though the anomalies don't bother most of them. Unlike in typical adventure yarns, the treasure sought is knowledge rather than money or equivalent goods - risky, in a world where religious and secular authorities want certain secrets kept.

It's an OK read, if you are into adventure stories. But it had the potential to be so much better.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, first of a series, 2021
- Author: male, American, born 1960, novelist - already read this year
- English, public library, 595 pages, read July 16-Aug 19, 3 stars

69. Origin : a genetic history of the Americas by Jennifer Raff

This is a book written by a geneticist about the peopling of the Americas, based on archaeological and genetic evidence. The author tries very hard to give multiple theories, not just one, when appropriate - which it usually is - and to warn us that her book may itself soon become dated, depending on future discoveries.

She also covers some of the history of research in this area, possibly in an attempt to humanize it and make it more memorable. (This failed, for me, merely giving me more details to fail to commit to memory. But it's a popular method, so it must work well for some students.)

Her other theme is the need to be sensitive to the concerns of native peoples, both with regard to genetic material from living people, and to the remains of long dead inhabitants of the Americas, presumably ancestors of existing first peoples. There's a lot of bad history there, of scientists doing to not-us, not-white, not-rich, not-powerful people that which would never be considered acceptable if done to high or even moderate status white people, living or dead. Unsurprisingly, the result is mistrust and non-cooperation. And the result of *that* is a lot less knowledge than we'd otherwise have. Raff stresses the need for native peoples to be full partners in any research that is bring done, for ethical even more than for practical reasons.

The book was OK, but both the humanization and the politics took space away from the science I came for, as did the history of discoveries and theories in the field. (Another reader might find they made the science more approachable, or more interesting, or both.) 3.5 stars.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2022
- Author: female, American, born 1979, scientist (genetics, anthropology), new to me
- English, public library, 328 pages, read Aug 8-20, 3.5 stars

Six more to go until I reach 75, but I don't think it will be in August. Two of the three I currently have in flight are very slow going. In one case, I'm taking extensive notes, supplemented by research on the web. In the other, I'm reading one little chapter at a time and doing the review exercises, hoping to thereby make the material stick better. (It seems to be working.) And I'm still playing that game intensively; you are getting this and my previous entry now primarily because the game has been unplayable for the past hour, and will remain unavailable for two more. (Log in right now, and your character may be eaten by wolves....)

70. Beasts before us : the untold story of mammal origins and evolution by Elsa Panciroli

This is a book about the early development of the line that led to mammals, concentrating on the time before and during the Age of Dinosaurs.

I knew approximately nothing about the pre-mammal line before the Age of Dinosaurs, but they were thriving and somewhat dominant before the mass extinction at the end of the Permian. After that, the surviving proto-mammals tended small and nocturnal, while dinosaurs dominated the large-bodied daytime niches. And while they were specializing in small and nocturnal, various changes evolved that would later prove useful to their much larger descendants, but could probably not have happened in larger animals. (In particular, changes in hearing, with bones moving from the jaw to the inner ear.) There were also vision changes, improving low light vision at the expense of colour vision, which later re-evolved several times. And most interestingly to me, major changes in dentition - mammals have lots of different types of teeth in one mouth, and only shed and replace their teeth once. All these changes provided a basis for later expansion, when the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous removed non-avian dinosaurs.

This is all fascinating stuff, and new to me. Yet the book didn't completely grab me - I think because there was too much in it about people. I'd love to read a biography of any of the scientists who were instrumental in making these discoveries. But I want to either read a biography, or a book about the science. And this book tells me about the life and career of Zofia Kielan-Jaworska, symposiums the author attended, the author's feelings on actually handling certain fossils, and specific research assignments early in her career. Also what it's like to look for fossils in various locations that are especially good for the relevant periods.

I understand the need to "humanize". No "normal" person could possibly remember the science without it being wrapped in descriptions of the weather, personalities at symposiums, and other inherently far more interesting details.

But I'm not a "normal person," and if I were, I'd doubtless be reading celebrity gossip rags, without any of that pesky boring science.

Most likely the author herself isn't "normal" in this way, or she'd never have managed to get a doctorate in anything except perhaps humanities. But like far too many of her peers, she's learned to write for "normal" people, at the expense of those most interested in her topic.

This is not unique to her, of course. And for the record, the only way I can stomach books on things like art, fashion, and interior design is when the inherently uninteresting (to me) subject matter details are well padded with biography. But it would be nice to have more books available for people who are actively interested in the subject, not trying to trick themselves into learning it.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: female, Scottish (British), age unknown (doctorate 2019), scientist (palaeontologist), new to me
- English, public library, 320 pages, read Aug 20-Sep 2, 4 stars

Day 2 of a big bad heatwave (complete with "excessive heat warning" from official sources). The days leading up to it weren't all that cool either.

The good news is that one of the few things I *can* do is read. The bad news is that my mind is mush, to the point where complex material I am trying to learn isn't staying with me.

It's currently just past 6:30 AM, and beginning to get light. Outdoors was comfortable - unlike inside my house - when I checked a few minutes ago. I'll be taking my morning walk ASAP, and bringing my very first cup of tea with me.

The weather is supposed to start improving by Thursday. So two more days of sleeping in the middle of the day, and accomplishing none of the important tasks which need attention.

71. Has China won? : the Chinese challenge to American primacy by Kishore Mahbubani

When I saw this book on the library's new books shelf, I recognized the author's name from Paul Cranswick's review of Mahbubani's Has the West Lost It. So I immediately grabbed ithis/i book, expecting roughly what I got - a non-American, non-Chinese view of the (poor) relationship between the US and China, particularly as seen from the POV of a Singaporean national of Indian extraction.

It was fascinating, perhaps primarily because of the viewpoint being both outside the two countries and itself located in Asia - i.e. nearer to China than to the US. The author's diplomatic background was interesting, but in some ways felt like he was living in an alternate reality, inhabited by diplomats and scholars, but not e.g. economists, let alone ordinary people. I'd like to read a non-American, non-Chinese economist's review of the book, or better yet their take on roughly the same subject.

It's too easy to remember a book full of new-to-me ideas in terms of soundbites. If I'm inevitably going to remember this one that way, the soundbite I'd choose would be "America prizes freedom; China prizes freedom from chaos." That needs to be unpacked a lot - I doubt the author is familiar with the discourse about the multiple contradictory definitions of "freedom" in the United States, and the effects of these contradictions on US politics, from their independence onwards. (Bias declaration: I don't find that preventing people from owning other people interferes with the "freedom" of the would-be owners, but some Americans have made that claim, and I suspect some may still do so.) But even without that unpacking, Mahbubani is obviously on to something.

Other soundbites of relevance: "America values strategic decisiveness; China values patience"; "America has abandoned multilateralism; China welcomes it"; "America is becoming a society of lasting inequality; China a meritocracy". That last one also needs a lot of unpacking - for one thing, it's pretty clear China has its own oppressed groups problem, which Mahbubani mostly diplomatically ignores.

Overall though, the book is a breath of fresh air, for a person in the United States, reading mostly in English, and so fairly consistently getting only one side of the story.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: male, Singapore, born 1948, diplomat turned academic (geopolitics), new to me
- English, public library, 320 pages, read Aug 20-Sep 7(?), 4 stars

>155 ArlieS: I'd quarrel with the multilateralism claim about China. Sounds like a fascinating book, and a welcome expansion of the US field of view. Don't melt into your chair if avoidable.

>156 richardderus: The weather is finally improving here. I was able to run the clothes dryer yesterday evening without feeling I was sacrificing all hope of comfort. Which was good, because I didn't want to stand outdoors hanging clothes early in the day, and I was running out of clean socks.

Unfortunately, my body reacted by deciding this morning that it would not get up early even in order to get a walk. I got up 3 hours later today than my usual time during the heatwave, after the time when I would have already been back from my walk.

OTOH, I obviously needed the sleep, and wouldn't entirely mind lying down again for an additional hour. And it should be cool enough to walk again before dark tonight, as it was yesterday - and wasn't in previous days of the heatwave.

And my coffee is almost ready; it may change my mind about going back to bed.

Pearl rule #7: Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

I'm abandoning this joint biography of four British women interested in philosophy after page 180 of 398. This is perhaps a little late, but I enjoyed the first part, where they were undergraduates at Oxford during World War II, thereby having a very different experience of Oxford than usual, with most of the younger men - students and teachers - away at war. I enjoyed the picture of Oxford life, perhaps because a friend of mine did her undergraduate degree there a generation later.

But after that point, I gradually realized I was bored; I just didn't care of all the details of these women's lives, both where they intersected with philosophy and where they did not. I had a brief flurry of interest when one of them became a friend/student of Wittgenstein; interesting to see something of the personality and behaviour of that massively difficult philosophy whose work I remembered from my own undergraduate days.

But if I could tell you two details from the chapter I just finished, I'd be surprised. (I remember one - bad behaviour when Wittgenstein visited Oxford for the first time.) That's a clear sign that life is too short for me to dpend more time reading this book.

And as for their developing philosophical positions - they simply do not compute for me, which seems worse than simply appearing wrong (incorrect). That doesn't mean they were bad philosophers, or that their philosophy is rubbish - no one died and set me up as the arbiter of philosophical correctness - it might seem just the thing to others, such as perhaps the two biographers. But it's obviously not for me.

2.5 stars, because I can easily imagine this being someone else's jam. It's not a bad book; I'm just bored out of my skull. And while there are a very few authors who can make inherently boring data an enjoyable read, they are exceptional - I can only name 2 or 3 like that off the top of my head. These co-authors aren't that good.

Aging is so much fun - not -. My brother in law, slightly younger than me, is in the hospital with a kidney stone. Very painful, but they gave him good drugs eventually. The poor guy has other serious health problems; I'm glad it wasn't his heart this time.

Meanwhile my sister is preparing the house for a hurricane - fortunately far enough north it'll probably be downgraded somewhat before it arrives, if it arrives.

On the good side (I think) is that our other sister is visiting there, and can help with the hurricane prep and everything else. Not great for the planned vacation of sisterly togetherness, perhaps. But I suspect the help will be very welcome.

72. Android Smartphones For Seniors For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) by Marsha Collier

I didn't want to read this book. The title feels like an insult; that I decided that my best course of action was to read it feels frankly humiliating.

What I wanted to read was a user's manual for Android phones, but nothing of the sort is available. (There is one book of this sort for iPhones, though it's rather out of date - and comes from a third party, not Apple. But nothing for Android.)

It turns out that Android is far too configurable to write a user's manual. Both phone manufacturers and telcos commonly make their own major changes to the user interface provided by Google, to the point that people on the same version of Android routinely tell each other how to do something, only to discover, after they exchange screen shots, that the method that works on one phone involves controls that don't even exist on the other.

Add to this the modern habit of using unlabelled hieroglyphics for most controls, because that's cheaper and easier than tackling the problem of translating text, AND the habit of "refreshing" the user interface with every release - and users have an unpaid part time job just repeatedly (re) learning how to use their phones.

For some reason, some people experience this as fun, rather than as a major imposition from vendors. Those people tend younger than me, perhaps too young to have ever experienced anything better. They also have a much better intuitive appreciation for the iconic design language - no one ever taught it to them, either, but they don't have as many past idioms cluttering up their memory and creating confusion. Perhaps they also have a better memory than I do for random images, especially ones with no inherent meaning.

Sadly, they tend to call these abilities "being tech savvy", when they aren't fairly obviously thinking of it as "not being senile". Hence books with titles like these, and many seniors having little or nothing good to say about the industry. (For the record - I was one of the wizards who made the damn things work, even while hating their UI designs with a fiery passion. Anyone who doesn't even know how to write code, but claims to be more tech savvy than me, is welcome to perform several anatomically impossible actions with their technology of choice.)

But OTOH - I had zero understanding of how the user interfaces were supposed to work, what design principles they might have, other than "make it pretty" and perhaps "make it hard to use", or what any of the screens and icons were called. I knew some monkey recipes, and painfully recreated them after each "user interface improvement". And I don't like not being a power user of any tool I use regularly, however obviously badly designed it may be.

So now that I'm retired, I decided I had time to do some research, and this sort of book was the best source I could find.

I picked this introductory Android book, rather than any of the myriad of others, because I was only able to find 3 such books with any coverage at all of Android 12 (the release I have), and this was the only one of the three available at either local library.

I read the book very slowly, taking notes and farther investigating things I learned by experimentation and web search. By the time I was a chapter or two in, I had the beginnings of a users manual for my particular phone, running the particular Android version most recently inflicted on me by an unwanted forced upgrade. I mentioned this on my blog, and got suggestions that I publish it, and one request for the very rudimentary version I already had. So I started adding things I already knew, as well as things I was learning for the first time, or converting from monkey recipe to actual understanding.

I have now reached page 226 of Collier's book (of 322), following this process. My partly written users manual is 80 pages long. There are 3 1/2 pages of terminology; at least 2 pages of that involve terms previously unknown to me, but required to make sense of many "how to" instructions. (E.g. common names for many of the unlabelled screens.) The section containing symbols - the image of an icon, plus a name (sadly, often invented by me, rather than useful for searching), is 4 1/2 pages long. There's a whole page giving only symbols that mean "tap here for more (info, options, etc.)" - I've found 7 so far, on the same phone, all in interfaces that come from Google itself, rather than apps from third parties.

Unfortunately, the Collier book is due back at the library on the 27th, and I've run out of renewals. So I hastily read the remaining 80 pages (not counting the index), without taking notes. I plan to reclaim the book, and use that final 80 pages as a basis for farther investigations and additions to my users' manual. I also plan to borrow some other introduction-to-Android-use books, and treat them the same way.

I wish Collier had written the users manual I'm writing, rather than the book she did write. I wish she'd thought about the user whose cell phone was "upgraded" from something they knew how to use to something they need to first investigate and then relearn. I wish she'd been more critical of Google, rather than consistently positive.

But the book did the job, in that I found something useful - and new to me - every 3 or 4 pages, even after having been an Android user since Palm switched to their PreOS, which never caught on, leaving previously happy Palm users to pick between iOS, Android, and perhaps Microsoft or Blackberry. (Blackberry was quite pricey; I went with Android because I found its interface least confusing of the other three, trying demo models in phone stores.)

Example: I'd heard rumors that Google had deployed some technology to recognize images. I didn't know the name, or the icon. So while there were several links to it on my phone, I never saw anything I identified as a link to this technology. Collier gave me the trade name Google uses. I think she even gave me an image of the icon Google uses to represent it. Her instructions for accessing it didn't work - another one of those cases where every phone has a different UI, and she wasn't describing my particular phone. But with a little help from search engines, I was able to find it on my phone, as well as articles both praising it and complaining about it.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, technology, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: female, American, age unknown, author/radio personality/podcast host, new to me
- English, public library, 322 pages, read July 13-Sep 25, 3 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 71.

73. The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain: 1880-1914 by Simon Heffer

This long book covers a 35 year period of British history. It's primarily a political history, focussing on top politicians - prime ministers and future prime ministers - events tend to be seen from their viewpoints, in terms of their goals and the choices open to them. Other aspects of history are covered - it's not an old-style history of rulers and their battles - but the political history feels most central.

The author clearly sympathizes with some of the politicians; in places the book feels like the author really wanted to write biographies of Prime Ministers Gladstone and Asquith, rather than a more general history of their times.

The picture painted in the latter third of the book is one of impending civil war, mostly in and about Ireland, but also potentially about relations between Capital and Labour, providentially prevented by the arrival of World War II. This surprised me; I knew there was already trouble in Ireland - and had been for centuries. And I knew about the Easter Uprising. But the scale of armed militia, in both Ulster and the rest of Ireland, completely surprised me.

I'm not sure how much my surprise was due to ignorance, how much to differences in British and North American views of this period, and how much was due to this author taking an unusual position. In researching the author's biography, I find he's on the conservative side of British politics, which might well be coloring his view of history. (At least he does't regard giving poor men the vote - progressing during this period - as a major mistake. He's not even against women voting, though he regards the suffragettes as terrorists pure and simple.)

Overall, this was an interesting book, and added a lot more detail to my knowledge of this period. I'm inclined to see whether the author has written similar books about other periods - but also to find some other author's take on this one, to provide somewhat of a reality check.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, British, born 1960, journalist, new to me
- English, public library, 897 pages, read Sep 5-29, 4 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 72.

Minor Quandry: Do I finish How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley, so as to write a well informed bad review, and get one book closer to 75 - or do I Pearl rule it after page 77 of 193 (not counting notes, index etc.) because life is too short to read a book that unironically commits every sin it attributes to its political opponents?

74. An Environmental History of the Civil War by Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver

This book is a history of environmental factors as they interacted with the US Civil War. It's not about the war itself, though generals and campaigns are mentioned. It's about illnesses caused by crowding in both humans and livestock; floods and droughts and their effects on soldiers and civilians; the difficulty of keeping soldiers and civilians fed; the effects on forests and fields; the problems of dealing with human and animal corpses and similar matters.

The presentation is thematic, but also roughly chronological - e.g. disease is covered in the first chapter, with examples associated primarily with the early stages of the war, when recruits from many locations met, exchanged microbes, and sickened with whatever childhood diseases not endemic in their home locality. Riding horses, draft animals and other livestock were likewise gathered from large areas, and crowded together in army camps, exchanging their own microbes, with a similar result.

The 6 chapters are Sickness; Weather; Food; Animals; Death and Disability; and Terrain, with an epilogue about longer term effects. Each of them taught me something.

This is the kind of non-fiction book I love - it expanded my knowledge of something basically technical, without the personalities of the authors intruding. No gloomy predictions for the future either, nor a call to arms to prevent impending problems - all the space was devoted to the book's ostensible topic.

I rated it 4, rather than 5, because it's too short - I want more! - and while the writing is quite readable, it isn't the great writing I've experienced from a few other historians. (There are a couple of historians whose books I'd read on sight even without any interest in their specific topic; their writing style is just that good.)

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2020
- Author 1: male, American, age unknown (BA 1996, PhD 2006), academic (military history), new to me
- Author 2: male, American, age unknown, academic (environmental history), new to me
- English, public library, 261 pages, read Sep 22-Oct 2, 4 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 73.

>162 ArlieS: Life is too short.

>164 richardderus: I'm insane. I finished it this morning, just so I could write an informed bad review.

75. How fascism works : the politics of us and them by Jason Stanley

This is a bad book. The author attempts to characterise fascist politics, but unironically commits commits most of the tactics he attributes to fascists. He defines what he means by "fascist" and by implication "fascist politics", and then appears to write parts of the book based on two other definitions. I don't think the author is disingenuous or attempting his own propaganda - I think he's guilty of wooly thinking and/or wooly writing, possibly in an attempt to make the book accessible to lay readers. This "lay reader" was not impressed.

On page xiv, the author writes "I have chosen the label 'fascism' for ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf." He continues later on the same page "My interest in this book is in fascist politics. Specifically my interest is in fascist tactics as a mechanism to achieve power. ... Fascist politics does not necessarily lead to an explicitly fascist state, but it is dangerous nonetheless."

His chapter titles provide a list of what he presents as fascist political tactics/stances/myths:
1. The Mythic Past
2. Propaganda
3. Anti-Intellectual
4. Unreality
5. Hierarchy
6. Victimhood
7. Law and Order
8. Sexual Anxiety
9. Sodom and Gomorrah
10. Arbeit Macht Frei

Some should be obvious from the titles; others may need some explanation.

His evidence for the list is simple - he finds authors he can label fascist who wrote something of the kind. Or failing that, he finds historians who attribute such beliefs to one or other of the fascist states of the world war II era. He never looks for non-fascists doing the same thing. And as the book progresses, it becomes clear that not supporting various American left wing political beliefs (presumably those shared by the author), is adequate evidence for fascism, though he prefers to pick fascist examples at least associated with political party or candidate labelled "right wing".

This list might be useful to someone unfamiliar with what I'd prefer to call right wing preoccupations and shibboleths. Many of these do, in my opinion, turn up more frequently among right than left wing political tracts, platforms, shibboleths, etc. (I note, of course, that there's no clear definition of "right wing" to be had, particularly if you don't limit yourself to the last few decades of history in a single country.)

It wasn't useful to me. And IMO, the political naif would be better served by a list that included tactics - and examples - not confined to a single side in US politics.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2018
- Author: male, American, born 1969, academic (philosophy), new to me
- English, public library, 218 pages, read Sep 30-Oct 6, 2.5 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 74.

76. A place to hang the moon by Kate Albus

I read this children's novel as result of a book bullet from curioussquared, and I'm glad I did. It pressed all the right emotional buttons to give me a good, cathartic cry or two, and everything came out right in the end. I also enjoyed the respite from my normal reading level - I probably read 2-3 pages of this in the time it took me to read one page of The Age of Decadence (my #72), and maybe more. It's also the kind of story I can easily identify with - the protagonists are bookish, emotionally neglected children.

If I put on my critic's hat, I can see it as yet another example of what seems to be a newly common genre, stories by Americans too young for the WWII experience to have been common knowledge among adults in their youth, sometimes too young to have personally known WWII veterans - set in England during WWII, or sometimes WWI. I'm rather older than these authors; my father was posted in Yorkshire during WWII (he was an airman); some of my other relatives were British subjects living in the UK during that war. The UK these books picture is generally not the same place I learned about from all these relatives.

This book makes fewer obvious-to-me errors of tone and detail than most members of the genre, and most of those can be explained by the tendency to gloss over bad things when writing for children.

It's also emphatically not about World War II. The war functions as a plot device, first to get the children evacuated into the country among strangers, and later to allow a potentially problematic adult (who we never met) to be conveniently removed (killed in an air raid).

Overall, a fun read, and I'll be likely to read other books by this author in future.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction, juvenile, not series, 2021
- Author: female, American, age unknown, novelist - new to me
- English, public library, 509 pages, read Oct 7-11, 4 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 75.

>167 ArlieS: Oh, I'm glad it was a hit with you! And congrats on 75!

>168 curioussquared: Thank you.

>167 ArlieS: Congratulations on reaching 75, Arlie!

Congrats!

>170 FAMeulstee: >171 drneutron: Thank you both.

77. Hurricane lizards and plastic squid : the fraught and fascinating biology of climate change by Thor Hanson

Finally, a book about climate change that isn't either "this is bad; we should do something about it" or "look at this silver bullet I've invented; we should use it". Instead, it's about the ways in which plants and animals respond to climate change, with real examples, a few of which rather surprised the scientists studying them.

I read this book in a tearing hurry. Some dastardly fellow library patron put a hold on it before I'd even started it. It was one I'd found on the new book shelf, so wasn't entirely sure how much I'd like it; I picked it up to decide whether to give up on it, or put my own hold on it as soon as I returned it. Instead, I read enough of it to decide to just keep reading - I'd discovered the hold 4 days before the book was due.

This book taught me new things, in an area I care about, and did it in an interesting way - and that's my ultimate accolade, for a science book.

It wasn't perfect; it spent a lot of pages telling me about various people involved in the science, interspersed among the science itself. It also rehashed climate change 101 - but fortunately did that in an original manner, featuring home science projects with the author's son, e.g. recreating aspects of the discovery of carbon dioxide.

The author is quite readable, and as said above, it discussed research I didn't recall from prior reading - not the same old examples everyone uses. I gave it 4 stars rather than 5 primarily because it shares the modern habit of describing the people, their offices, etc. etc.

Note on the title: the squid are "plastic" in the sense of being able to change their behaviour in response to conditions, and the lizards showed fairly fast evolution in response to hurricanes.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, American, age unknown, scientist (conservation biologist), new to me
- English, public library, 280 pages, read Oct 15-16, 4 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 76.

78. Lincoln's Spies: Their Secret War to Save a Nation by Douglas Waller

This book is an OK history of Northern espionage activities in an important region of the US Civil War - the one containing both capital cities. It was readable, but didn't especially grab me.

It had either too much or too little about the war itself, for me. I haven't especially studied that war, so a short reference to some particular battle tells me very little - there's no flood of information provided by my memory. (Mostly, if you name a battle or march, I'll correctly categorize it as belonging to the US civil war, but not be able to find it on a map, name the generals involved, or tell you either why it was important, or which side won.)

OTOH, it would probably suit a Civil War buff just fine, and quite possibly give them a new way of looking at events they'd previously seen primarily through lenses of battle, politics, and similar.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2020
- Author: male, American, born 1949, journalist, new to me
- English, public library, 595 pages, read Sept 16-Oct 16, 3 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 77.

>174 ArlieS: Allan Pinkerton was such a horse's ass that any book about him will talk more about his failures than his successes. He was a hard working cuss, have to say

Did they mention the wonderful and dashing Gustavus Fox? The James Bond of the Civil War Era.

>175 magicians_nephew: It certainly had a lot to say about Pinkerton mis-applying methods useful for crime solving but not espionage, and also him providing insanely enormous estimates of enemy forces.

OTOH, I don't recall the book mentioning Gustavus Fox at all.

I just learned - at least 3 days late - that there's a Halloween treasure hunt in progress. https://www.librarything.com/hunt.php?y=2022&m=10

This is not my genre, and I'm afraid I resorted to Google for one of the clues, and have only gotten 3 out of 15. (So far - but I'm unlikely to continue, since it feels like cheating to use search to find books and authors I've neither heard of nor read.)

>177 ArlieS: I would never find all answers without searching the web, Arlie, as it is totally not my genre either. That doesn't feel like cheating to me. I also use the help at the thread. It is just fun, no matter how you find the ghosts ;-)

I guess I've arrived. I've had my very own visit by a spammer. Fortunately they were gone before I noticed their "contribution."

79. The girls who stepped out of line : untold stories of the women who changed the course of World War II by Mari K. Eder

This is a collection of mini-biographies (of relevant events at least) of women (sometimes girls at the time) who did something interesting during WWII, preferably important, heroic, or both. The author is obviously American - the preponderance of her subjects were either American-born, or moved to the US after the war ended. It is not, however, a book intentionally focussed on Americans; I particularly remember the story of two British opera buffs, who used opera-going holidays in Europe as cover for smuggling potential victims of the Nazis (mostly Jewish) back to Britain with them.

I enjoyed this book. It was relatively light and mostly positive, though it featured a lot of military and military-adjacent women who got no recognition until decades after the war, and a few women who were captured and badly abused.

The subtitle is hyperbolic; a significant number of these women had effects only at the margins, even if you include all who did the same things they did. But I'll forgive it that little issue, since it's so common as to seem like the normal way to write sub-titles ;-(

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: female, American, age unknown (BA in 1975), military (retired major general), new to me
- English, public library, 398 pages, read Oct 6-21, 3.5 stars

NOTE: Originally mis-numbered as 78.

Pearl rule 8. Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I'm abandoning this book after reading the first two chapters, technically one page short of reading one page less than my age.

This is a novel, playing horror themes for laughs, in a sci fi/fantasy setting, from the viewpoint of a repeatedly coerced indentured servant, soon (from the blurb) to become more important, but almost certainly still very much coerced.

I don't like hopelessness in my reading, particularly fiction. The viewpoint character has been struggling to free themself from their indentured servitude, without success, from the age of 4. She fails yet again in chapter two, complete with many attempts at emotional manipulation from her owners' less rebellious servants, as well as the eventual trickery by one of the owners. This left me less than eager to read chapter 3, which is where I expect the latest failure to be consummated. (It's technically merely set up/foreshadowed in chapter 2.)

I also don't tend to read horror, so humour based on subverting horror tropes is likely to be lost on me. Net result: I'm done with this book.

I'm not sure how it got on my TBR list - most likely it was an automatic recommendation from LibraryThing.

It's probably not a bad book, if you like this kind of thing. And there's some slight chance that it might become more to my tastes, after it gets past the introduction and scene setting. (It's not unusual to coerce characters into participating in a risky or heroic plot, without the rest of the book being basically about hopelessness. But such books don't normally begin by dwelling on a past involving repeated failure to escape coercion.) But someone's put a hold on it at the library, and that small chance is emphatically not worth the effort of either trying to read it in a tearing hurry (3 days start to finish), or reclaiming it and finishing it after a several-week gap.

Slightly belated congratulations on passing 75 books, Arlie. Actually I think you did it a little sooner than you realised as you seem to have counted your 71st book twice! (refer >155 ArlieS: & >160 ArlieS: )

Have a great weekend.

>183 PaulCranswick: Good catch. How on earth did I manage to do that ;-)

You have a great weekend too.

80. The princess spy : the true story of World War II spy Aline Griffith, Countess of Romanones by Larry Loftis

This is an attempt at a non-fiction biography of a woman who wrote multiple memoirs, containing both contradictions and verifiably false incidents. We know she worked for the OSS (predecessor of the CIA), initially as a code clerk, in Spain during and after World War II. It's reasonably plausible that she became an actual espionage agent, specializing at least in part in high society. We know she married the heir to a Spanish count, who eventually became count himself. Beyond that, the author tries to separate truth from fiction and include only the latter, even while telling the tale much more as a story than as a research document, though with footnotes, bibliography, and a final chapter discussing claims that were made along with their contradictions.

I enjoyed it, but more as a novel than as a history. Maybe the author got things mostly right, and it's surely more plausible than the subject's own memoirs. Maybe they didn't. It was easier for me to just suspend disbelief and enjoy the story, than turn on critical thinking for an area in which I am not well informed, and don't need to become expert. With that caveat, it's a pleasant read.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, biography, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, probably American, age unknown, author (non-fiction spy thrillers) and lawyer, new to me
- English, public library, 361 pages, read Oct 17-25, 4 stars

I'm having bureaucratic annoyances for breakfast. My credit card was due to expire on Nov 1. That's two days from now. The replacement finally arrived yesterday, in an unmarked envelope, so looking like yet another spam. Now I need to activate it.

Meanwhile, I changed health insurance providers, as a side effect of reaching 65 and becoming eligible for Medicare (US health coverage for old folks). I'd been receiving my medications from the mail order pharmacy associated with my previous insurer. The new insurer wants me using their preferred pharmacy, and in any case the prior one is no longer available to me. I haven't found a way to transfer my prescriptions.

So I just checked all my medications - some of which I have in excess quantities thanks to other bureaucratic foolery - figured out approximately when I'd need more of each of them, and sent a message to the office that prescribed the only one I expect to actually need more of in the next two months, explaining the mess and requesting a new prescription be sent to my new mail order pharmacy.

Then I put an event in my calendar, two months from now, to request that the next 2 medications be transferred. What a way to spend a Sunday morning.

I had a bureaucratic annoyance midweek last when I discovered that the surviving spouse does NOT automatically take over an account that's in the decedent's name. Huh? Account gets cancelled and the survivor has to reapply. Definitely upset my household accounts.

>187 weird_O: Grr!

81. Our first civil war : patriots and loyalists in the Revolution by H. W. Brands

This is a decent history of the American Revolution. It focusses on military and diplomatic events, with a bit of politics. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington are followed closely; other individuals less so.

It does the job adequately, and is quite readable, but I can't say it's special. It doesn't pay much attention to loyalists, in spite of the title, except to an extent to Benjamin Franklin's son William; to black slaves who fled their Patriot masters to join the British, who had promised freedom; and to a few others, such as wives left behind in territory that was soon captured.

The development of Benjamin Franklin's goals and ideals was interesting, as was George Washington's unenviable position commanding underfunded, underfed and often numerically inferior troops. I hadn't read about them in such depth before. The memoirs from black participants were also quite interesting, and to a lesser extent from those participants who survived some rather horrendous conditions as war prisoners (considered mere criminals by the British, and treated accordingly). But much of the rest was quite familiar; I've read about this before, and was hoping for an interestingly different approach.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, American, born 1953, academic (history), new to me
- English, public library, 486 pages, read Sep 30-Oct 29, 3.5 stars

It is by no means useless to view the American Revolution not as a war between colonists and empire but as a true "Civil War" between Loyalists and Rebels, lasting even up until the War of 1812.

Rick Atkinson's The British are Coming has some things to say about that. Men who did not much more than honor their oaths of service to the Crown were treated horribly by the victorious "Americans" after the shooting stopped.

There was a pretty good book a few years ago about the war from the British point of view - if i can remember the title i will pass it along.

>190 magicians_nephew: I agree that it's useful. I just don't think the book I just read did as good a job of that as I'd hoped when I picked it up.

FWIW, I am Canadian. We tend to be taught to appreciate the Loyalists, many of whom resettled in Canada after losing the war.

"There was a pretty good book a few years ago about the war from the British point of view - if i can remember the title i will pass it along."

I hope you remember it; I think I'd enjoy reading it.

82. Tamed : ten species that changed our world by Alice M. Roberts

This is a book about the domestication of 10 plants and animals, including human beings. It mixes in other relevant information about some of the species, and goes off into a tangent about genetic engineering specifically in the context of rice.

I didn't find any big surprises here, having read in this area before, but it's well written and quite readable. And there were plenty of little details I didn't know - along with a couple which made me wonder if she'd checked the latest research (on dogs, in particular).

The author is as much a science communicator as a scientist, AFAICT, having had roles like professor of public engagement in science (at the University of Birmingham). It shows - she's writing for the lay public, not her peers, and is very well practiced at doing so.

Overall, this is a decent book, minus several common flaws of recent books about science addressed to the lay public. If it had had a bit more new to me, and a bit less about the GMO controversy, I'd have rated it 4.5.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2018
- Author: female, British, born 1973, academic (biology), new to me
- English, public library, 360 pages, read Oct 13-30, 4 stars

83. The constitution of knowledge : a defense of truth by Jonathan Rauch

This is an excellent work defending the search for truth, via mutual criticism, as ideally used in all academic disciplines, along with journalism, and, for some people some of the time, daily life. The idea is that human beings all have blind spots, biases, etc., but we can get closer to truth by getting input from as many others as possible - the more diverse the better - as their biases and blind spots may differ. Hence we have the scientific method, ideally proceeding via peer review, replication, and the whole apparatus many of us learned about in school. But we also have the critical methods of history, astronomy, and many other fields which lack the ability to perform controlled experiments.

The book offers an extended analogy to the way a good democratic political system is designed to work. Ideally no one group can dominate, and there's a never-ending tug-of-war between numerous interests, generally winding up with policies somewhere in between what each extreme would like - and rarely static, as the balance of interests change, or deals are made between them. Hence the title.

It also devotes long chapters to two currently prominent ways that this search for truth is being derailed, complete with many current examples. On the one hand, you have the spewing out and amplification of convenient rubbish, with no concern for truth - whether for lolz, political advantage, or to destabilize a foreign power. On the other hand, you have the requirement that all communication be 100% unoffensive to any possible complainant - or at least any complainant deemed credible by Twitter mobs, university bureaucracy, or groups of eager de-platformers. (Yes, I've bent over backwards not to use the usual labels for these behaviours, as those tend to trigger knee-jerk reactions.)

Perhaps unusually, this author retains epistemic humility, at least in writing. The methods he describes take time to work - sometimes generations. We don't know now what faux truths all the best members of the truth seeking communities all agree upon, so certain that they neglect to consider any criticism they encounter. etc. etc. Like democracy, these methods are presented as better than any alternatives which have been tried, rather than as perfect.

I liked the book so much that I really really wanted to improve it, by talking to the author about what appear to me to be some of his blind spots. Sadly, I imagine that my input would be filtered out, because on the one hand, most of the responses he receives are probably from crackpots, and on the other hand, it would be trivially easy to pattern match my prime concerns with those of more articulate members of one of the groups of trouble makers. (My point would be that these methods may not in fact be best for people in certain situations, who most likely turn up disproportionately represented in one of these groups. The 'constitution of knowledge' needs to adapt to handle what I see as their quite legitimate complaints - or adopt other methods, such as censorship, to shut them up while thereby simultaneously undermining their own claimed goals.)

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: male, American, born 1960, author (and journalist and activist), new to me
- English, public library, 305 pages, read Oct 30-Nov 5, 4.5 stars

84. Prisoners of geography : our world explained in 12 simple maps by Tim Marshall

This book consists of a series of maps, with commentary both on the map and in two or three following pages per map. The idea is to convey the geographic context affecting international relations. This strikes me as a wonderful idea.

I added it to my TBR list it based on a favorable mention in a blog post, but was surprised when I actually got it to find that it was a mere 78 pages long, and intended for juveniles.

It turns out there's an adults' version with a very similar name, Prisoners of Geography without the subtitle, and I'd requested the wrong one from the library. I very much want to read that version, which is probably the one the blogger intended to recommend.

This was a 3 star read for me, but I'm not the intended audience. I've added an extra half star to compensate.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics (no really appropriate category in my list), series: n/a, 2021, juvenile
- Author: male, British, born 1959, journalist, new to me
- English, public library, 78 pages, read Oct 27-Nov 7, 3.5 stars

Two days ago we made a trip to the more distant library, to return some no longer renewable books. Naturally we also brought along and returned any we had finished, due or not, and focussed on reading almost-finished books from that library in the days preceding.

Of course that left me with one book with less than 40 pages remaining, which I finished the next day. I'll post my mini-review of it soon - probably later today.

Less inevitable, but still common, was that one of the books was not recorded as being checked in. I know it was in my roommate's stack when we left, and she reports that she counted books as she dropped them in the return slot, and the count was correct. So it presumably was a library error rather than a user error. We'll talk to them about it when we're next in the building; on past occasions we've been known to find the missed book already re-shelved, and bring it to that discussion. (But this is a multi-branch library; the book might already be in transit to another branch, without being recorded as checked in.)

85. Looking for the good war : American amnesia and the violent pursuit of happiness by Elizabeth D. Samet

This is a non-fiction book about war and its veterans, as seen in US culture over time, with special emphasis on the changing representation of world war II and its veterans. The author is a professor of English at West Point, putting her in an interesting position connecting two usually quite distinct areas of experience and viewpoint.

The book started slow, but got more and more fascinating for me; I wound up giving it 4.5 stars. I knew that there's a tendency for past events to become idealized - or demonized - certainly over simplified - as those who remember them personally age and die, and as they become useful sources for myths to influence current events.

I was particularly aware of this with World Wars I and II, as seen from Canada, being old enough that my father was a WW II veteran, and my grandparents were old enough to potentially have participated in WW I. (My maternal grandfather was rejected for service due to his extremely poor eyesight, much to his chagrin.) What the politicians in Canada have been saying about WW I in the past decade or two bears little resemblance to the war I know from their comments, or for that matter from reading relevant history.

What I didn't think about was how much the same thing was happening in other countries, such as the United States, where I now reside. Dr. Samet documents the changing presentation of World War II and its veterans in the US, particularly in entertainment media. This feeds into an eventual consensus on the political myth of the greatest generation.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: female, American, born 1969, academic, new to me
- English, public library, 354 pages, read Nov 1-9, 4.5 stars

86. Fugitive telemetry by Martha Wells

This is the 6th in a series about an android who hacked their control module, and eventually got free of the corporation that owned them. They are now living on a planet that doesn't allow corporations such powers, working as a security consultant. When a body is found on a space station, they are hired to assist the investigation.

Much of the series - and this novel in particular - is about their development in acting like - and expecting to be treated as - a person, rather than a thing - though unfortunately not always. This combines well with their quirky and sarcastic sense of humour; all these books are fun to read.

My twelfth book for 2021 was the 5th book in this series. Sadly, I'm now all caught up, and must wait for the author to publish additional installments.

Statistics:
- Fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2021
- Author: female, American, born 1964, novelist, author read in 2021
- English, public library, 168 pages, read Nov 6-11, 4 stars

>195 ArlieS: Trips to distant libraries are a pipe-dream for me just at the moment, Arlie. Maybe next year!

>198 PaulCranswick: This one's only a 30 minute drive away, unless traffic is crazy.

I live in a big urban area, where English is the primary language spoken. So there are lots of libraries useful to me.

I'm guessing things are very different where you are.

87. Fire and ice : the volcanoes of the solar system by Natalie Starkey

This is an excellent book about volcanoes in all their different varieties, along with the conditions that enable them, both on earth and on various planets and moons. It turns out several extraterrestrial bodies either have or had volcanoes, some producing molten or semi-molten rock, as on earth, and others on colder bodies producing various other substances, such as ice(*), which are normally solid at those bodies' surface temperatures.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: female, British, age unknown, academic (geologist), new to me
- English, public library, 320 pages, read Oct 27-Nov 15, 4 stars

88. Her honor : my life on the bench ... what works, what's broken, and how to change it by LaDoris Hazzard Cordell

A retired black female judge who worked in the county where I currently live talks about her experiences, giving laypeople a look into various legal areas. She's a lot more positive in this book than I could imagine myself ever being, even though she eventually left the bench in part because of being required to impose sentences which, while legal, did not seem to her to be just. I needed that positive viewpoint when I started the book.

OTOH, as she gets into criminal law, the built-in injustices take center stage. Justice Cordell is the kind of person who favors reform, not revolution, having a level of faith in the system and the principles it is built on. But at the same time, she's all too aware of ways the system fails - not just incidentally, but systematically and routinely. So it's a fairly clear eyed look, though with some amount of self-justification.

Most interesting to me, her career as a justice overlaps my residence in the same county. She writes about events I know from news stories. In particular, the 2016 case of the Stanford student Brock Turner, who was sentenced to six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, both parties being extremely drunk at the time. He was also expelled from Stanford. Justice Cordell was not involved in the case, so was free to comment publicly, whereas Justice Aaron Persky, who heard the case - and faced much criticism for the sentence - was not.

Justice Cordell felt that the sentence was appropriate and in line with the law, and felt that other consequences to the offender also counted as punishment. She spoke out both at the time and in this book in defense of Justice Persky. My guess is that it was indeed in line with the law - as well as extremely offensive to public opinion, including mine. Justice Persky was recalled by county voters in 2018.

After reading this book, I can see why Justice Cordell tried to defend him. And I'm less certain that this was the wrong sentence - given the laws in place at the time - if of course a similar light sentence would have been given to an otherwise similar defendant who was neither white nor a student at an elite university.

But this was only a small part of the book. You don't need to care about that case to appreciate this book.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, biography, series: n/a, 2021
- Author: female (black and lesbian), American, age unknown (BA 1971), academic (law), lawyer, judge, university administrator and more, new to me
- English, public library, 309 pages, read Nov 10-20, 4 stars

Thank you as always for books, thank you for this group and thanks for you. Have a lovely day, Arlie.

89. Bullshit jobs by David Graeber

This is a book about unnecessary jobs, and jobs with a mix of necessary and useless tasks. Sometimes people have nothing much to do except look busy; perhaps they were hired primarily to increase their boss' perceived importance. Sometimes their job involves doing something that ought to be automated, like copying data by hand between two incompatible systems, kept incompatible for non-technical reasons. Sometimes their job is the result of out-of-control red tape, making sure all the required boxes get ticked on the form that no one's every actually going to look at. Sometimes their job is the result of rules intended to save money or prevent cheating, that cost more to enforce than the enforcement could possible save.

Professor Graeber's theory is that this kind of thing has been on the increase for decades, and accounts for a lot of cost disease - e.g. the ever growing costs of medicine, education etc. There aren't more doctors, or teachers, or nurses - just more bureaucrats with jobs of dubious utility, though often of higher pay than anyone doing obviously useful work. Contrary to US conservative doctrine, this isn't all happening in government, or to comply with government mandates. And outsourcing government functions to supposedly lean private industry can easily make things worse. But it isn't all private enterprise either - it's all over the place.

His other main point is that having a job like this tends to make employees miserable. They usually know that what they are doing is useless, or fake, or better automated. Sometimes they get sick. Often they get demoralized and depressed. People want to see themselves making a meaningful contribution, and they don't especially like being assigned joint responsibility for preserving their manager's lies.

This is the third book I can recall reading by this author, and the second one this year. He's always interesting, and almost always points out things I don't know, or approaches known facts from an unfamiliar angle. On the other hand, I don't trust his remedies. He's a self-described anarchist, and I find that anarchists, minarchists and libertarians generally live in a theoretical world where people simply aren't much like those I've met, and human nature lacks the tendency to competitive power grabbing I regularly encounter. Real life is messier than these theories. But I appreciate his alternative viewpoint, and the things he points out as undesirable that others simply take as unavoidable.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2019
- Author 1: male, American, born 1961, academic (anthropology), already read this year (#60)
- English, public library, 333 pages, read Nov 12-22, 4 stars

>196 ArlieS: I liked Looking for the Good War very much.

the subtitle "American Amnesia" says a lot

>204 magicians_nephew: Doesn't it just.

90. Prisoners of geography : ten maps that explain everything about the world by Tim Marshall

This is the book I intended to borrow when I instead borrowed my #84 - same author and similar title, but adapted for children.

It's good, but not quite great. Ten regions are discussed, some of them single countries, each in its own section preceded by a map.

The earlier sections say more about geography and history, explaining geographical constraints that have shaped policies sometimes well before the nation(s) took modern form. They discus things like "X regards area A as vital to its security, because it's the only easy route for a land invasion" or "Z is landlocked, reducing trade and thus prosperity, and much of their foreign policy has long been about getting themselves a port."

The middle part tends towards "nations A, B, and C were created by outsiders drawing lines on a map; the borders make no sense either geographically or in terms of the peoples living there, causing regular internal turmoil, independence movements, etc., along with conflicts about border regions."

The later sections say less about geographical constraints, and more about modern international issues: "X and Y both claim area A leading to tension".

I preferred the earlier sections, and wish the whole book had followed this model. But it's good enough even when it turns into discussion of areas claimed by both A and B, or of grudges held because of past territorial losses.

I recommend this to anyone interested in the subject, and intend to read other books by the same author.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics (no really appropriate category in my list), series: n/a, 2015
- Author: male, British, born 1959, journalist, already read this year
- English, public library, 291 pages, read Nov 19-29, 4 stars

Pearl rule 9. The magic kingdom of Landover . Volume 1 by Terry Brooks

This series of novels really ought to be perfect for me. I love seeing modern people dropped into fantasy adventures. But I just couldn't get into this one. There's too much about the problems back home, taking too long to get through, before the viewpoint character even makes it to the fantasy environment. He's also neither an interesting person nor one I find it especially easy to care about. If I were snowed in with this as the only unread book I had, I'd read more of it - it's not terrible. But with other books available, I just don't feel like picking this one up again.

Wow, it’s been a while since I read those - and I don’t think I ever read the last one. Brooks has always been a bit disappointing for me. Good ideas that really could be written better.

91. How we'll live on Mars by Stephen L. Petranek

This is a non-fiction book about humans exploring and settling Mars. It's a mix of advocacy and descriptions of how it could be done. Both would, IMO, be plausible enough for a science fiction novel. But as non-fiction, the polite term would be "excessive optimism" - but only about the space travel portion. I was particularly impressed by the suggestion that a species which can't get it together to control climate change on a basically very habitable planet, could and should terraform a far less habitable planet as insurance against existential threats - including climate change. (See the beginning of the last paragraph on page 5.)

It also suffers from failed prediction syndrome, only 8 years after publication. There's a particularly good period for travel to Mars coming up really soon (2025?) which this book predicted would be used by non-government crewed missions, naming specific organizations. If these were actually happening in this time frame, I'm reasonably sure they'd have been featured on science programs already, not to mention the regular news. I've encountered no sign of them.

The author's career has been in the publishing world, not engineering, astronomy, science, or space. This probably accounts for him taking hype and repeating it without sufficient critical thought. He also appears to be very much a space enthusiast. At a guess, he grew up reading the same science fiction I did, and really wants it to be true. Also, for some reason he really wants to go direct to Mars from Earth, not via a prior settlement on Earth's Moon; he basically ignores that potential approach, except for mentioning it as a reason for NASA being unhelpful in achieving crewed Mars missions any time soon.

That said, I see nothing intrinsically wrong with the actual science and engineering. I'm willing to believe that these techniques could work, and could work better than other suggested alternatives. The problems are financial, political, and similar. Robot missions produce scientific knowledge without human casualties, and are far far cheaper. As a species, we're working hard to create a world with fewer spare resources to devote to non-survival projects. (Mind you, plenty of Americans would e.g. let Pacific Islanders drown, refusing immigration, not funding mitigations, and absolutely not stopping climate change - instead devoting the resources to whatever they personally wanted, which for at least one billionaire might well include Mars colonization.) I don't see anyone personally affected by climate change problems preferring to fund a Mars colony rather than improving their own living conditions - particularly when anything resembling serious terraforming is likely to take several times as long as the United States has existed.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science (really engineering), series: n/a, 2015
- Author: male, American, age unknown (career described as spanning forty years, so probably at least 60), writer, new to me
- English, public library, 77 pages, read Nov 30-Dec 3, 3 stars

I have once again achieved the rare feat of being completely caught up on all the LibraryThing threads I have starred. I am recording it for posterity, because it probably won't even last long enough for me to make this post.

Caught up on all the threads you've starred? Holy Toledo!

>209 ArlieS: "excessive optimism syndrome" is such a polite way of saying "barking mad obtuseness"...and it's rife among the Mars-mad space bros. Their "Mars Direct or Bust" rhetoric is foolish because it ignores the need of any actor, public or private, to deal with politics. The Moon's an easier sell. It's also a much more cautious way to achieve their goal. We need to learn how to build things in low-gravity environments and the Moon's within help-shouting range where Mars is not.

Learning how to grow food...to make water...to generate lots and lots of power over a long time...all are easier to achieve when the public doesn't need to be consoled over the brave sacrifices of the dead colonists but rather soothed over the billions it cost to rescue them.

There's a particularly good period for travel to Mars coming up really soon (2025?) which this book predicted would be used by non-government crewed missions, naming specific organizations.

🤔 There’s a Mars window every 26 months. Why would 2025 be special? Ok, both Mars and Earth are in elliptic orbits, so some are “better” than others, but it’s not that different…

Anyway, I love it when people who haven’t any idea how hard interplanetary missions are make predictions. 🙄

Ok, rant over…

>213 drneutron: ROFLMAO If I hadn't already returned the book to the library, I'd try to find exactly what was said. IIRC, the author was quoting a press release, from some small/start up company making claims about their future intentions.

Is it possible there was something interesting about a third planet's position (not just the Earth and Mars) meaning that as well as it being a shortest-distance-to-travel configuration, there'd be a way to get some kind of gravitational boost? Though I can't imagine how that would work, given that there's no other planet between Earth and Mars.

Other than that, I freely confess to lazy reading. There was a time when I knew all the basic math involved, and would have checked their work (to a rough approximation) as a matter of reflex. Now college physics is long ago, and I'd have to RTFM in detail and probably relearn some of the math.

I guess it's pretty clear I won't be achieving 100 books read this year. I might still manage 95; I have two more finished but not yet added to The List. And I have quite a stack of unread books due back at the library (not renewable) on January 3rd. But as I get farther into retirement - and farther from my medical issues of early 2021 - I'm finding so many other fun things to do as well as reading, and not spending so much time not fit to do anything more ambitious than reading a novel.

92. An incomplete revenge : a Maisie Dobbs novel by Jacqueline Winspear

I continue to enjoy this series of mysteries in a historical setting, which I first began reading in 2021. This is the fifth volume; I have many more still to enjoy.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction/mystery, series (not first), 2008
- Author: female, British, born 1955, novelist, author read in 2021
- English, public library, 306 pages, read Nov 24-Dec 9, 4 stars

>214 ArlieS: Nah, there’s no benefit in a flyby of some sort. Direct to Mars is optimal. Press release.. 🙄 Oy.

>215 ArlieS: I’ll be lucky to crack 95 at this rate. I think 100 Is off the table. Ah, well. The average American reads, what, two books a year? 😀

93. First contacts : the essential Murray Leinster by Murray Leinster (pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins.

This is a lovely book of science fiction stories from a single author. Copyright dates range from 1934-1956, except for an introduction added by the editor who pulled them together in a single book in 1998.

I like this author's writing style, both the matter-of-fact protagonists and his tendency to reveal a surprising twist at the end of each story. His style seems to particularly suit the short story format - which allows him to include the right amount of detail for the story, with little extraneous.

These stories are written in the style of their time. And the author had no inkling of what tropes were to become old and tired by 2022 - but even when he's one of the earlier users of one of these tropes, he may well do it very differently from what's become the modern standard. For me its like a breath of the past - writing like this was still common on the library shelves when I began reading science fiction, even though it would already have been considered a bit dated. I list the author as "new to me", but I may well have read some of his stories, back in the day.

Many modern young people will not be able to get past the assumptions of the author's day. People behave appropriately to their gender; a young man can grow up to become an officer on a generation ship, but the daughter of the Captain - equally adept at dealing with the challenges that occur - cannot. (Within those limits, though, she makes her own decisions and pulls her own weight.) Viewpoint characters are always male. Sexual relationship are always heterosexual, and even when they are coercive, the women are to be coerced into marriage, rather than into prostitution or non-marital rape. (For the record, these attempts are never successful.)

There's also a strong assumption that when intelligent species meet, there will always be conflict, even when no one really wants it - it's just too dangerous not to attempt to conquer or eliminate an equally powerful "not us" - and if the other might possibly be more powerful than "us", that's even more terrible. But he generally sets these up symmetrically - the aliens often feel about humans much the way humans feel about them.

I recommend this book to any science fiction reader who appreciates stories that work out implications of situations in creative ways, and who doesn't require modern sensibilities in their protagonists.

I dithered between 4 and 4.5 stars, and finally settled on 4, but it's really 4 and a quarter.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, non-series, 1998, stories
- Author: male, American, born 1896, new to me
- English, public library, 464 pages, read Nov 13-Dec 11, 4 stars

94. 25 Steps to Learning 2/1 by Paul Thurston

Like my #51 for the year, this is a previously-unread bridge book which I found on my shelves while sorting and cataloging books earlier this year. It's the second of three books I found there about the same bidding system, which has become the most popular one among the people I play with. Most likely I'd only intended to buy one, to learn the basics of the system, but mistakes happen with an uncatalogued disorganized TBR mountain.

I started this book right after I finished the other one, and read diligently until I got to the part involving details only a person intending to use the system themselves would need, complete with quizzes and exercises. Then I bogged down, not because there was anything wrong with the book, but because doing those exercises felt like work, while at the same time not so useful. (I had happily done earlier exercises, covering more fundamental features of the system.) This week I decided to pick it up and finish the last dozen pages, just to get one more book finished in 2022.

It's a good book, and part of an excellent series. I go back to other members of the series regularly to check details and review. If bridge is your thing, particularly duplicate bridge, and you want to learn the 2 over 1 bidding system, I recommend it.

- non-fiction, games, series: n/a, 2002
- Author: male, Canadian, age unknown, bridge columnist and international level bridge player (may also have other money jobs), new to me
- English, TBR shelf, 141 pages, read June 27-Dec 15, 3.5 stars

Who'd have thunk it? The LibraryThing list of staff members' top five books of 2022 at https://blog.librarything.com/2022/12/top-five-books-of-2022/ has provided me with 5 book bullets.

1. After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
2. If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where Is Everybody?
3. Persians: The Age of the Great Kings
4. The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design
5. Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World's Oceans

Persians was a fave of mine this year too. I highly recommend it!

95. Otherlands : a journey through Earth's extinct worlds by Thomas Halliday

This book describes the life and environment of 16 sites in increasingly early time periods, starting with the Pleistocene and ending with the Ediacaran epoch. Each section starts with a description - sounds, sights, temperature, humidity, etc. and then proceeds to describe how the life and environment then and there relate to other times and places. All are based on particular paleontological sites that were preserved in unusual detail.

This is a lovely way to convey a large amount of detail about what the far past was actually like, complete with the research that supports our understanding. It's easy for a non-specialist to blur periods in their mind, and to misremember the order in which things evolved; this method may not help me remember that Devonian comes after Silurian, but it does give me two separate mind-pictures of a specific Devonian and specific Silurian site. And the image is in terms of what things would have looked like then, not just what the fossils recovered from them look like today.

My only real complaint about this book is the epilogue, all about the problems of climate change in the modern era. It seems to be a trope - any book about biology or evolution needs to discuss climate change, wring hands and prescribe remedies, lest somewhere somehow some individual interested in biology has missed hearing about it, or subscribes to an ideology which insists no such thing is occurring - yet will be convinced to see the light if they simply read one more sermon. I'm heartily sick of this seemingly obligatory section, and subtracted half a star for its presence. I could spend the rest of my life reading about how terrible climate change is without that changing the situation one iota; all it would do would make me more angry and depressed. Biologists have no particular expertise in politics, and neither do I, and I don't pick up their books to read about essentially political problems.

I note, for the record, that humans are *not* the kind of species that generally do well after catastrophes, including mass extinctions. (These are sometimes called disaster taxa). We aren't tiny short-lived generalists who produce masses of offspring. If we create enough change of the wrong types, we won't be among the survivors. That's obvious *without* the obligatory final section. The real question is whether we can bumble into a relatively soft landing - in spite of our chronic short termism, localism, and laser focus on individual status, power, etc., and our tendency to believe that whatever we grew up with is normal.

Read this book. Unless you are yourself a paleobiologist, you'll learn interesting things from it, and reinforce others you've already heard of. But feel free to skip the epilogue.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2022
- Author: male, British, age unknown (holds an early career fellowship), scientist (paleontologist and evolutionary biologist) , new to me
- English, public library, 385 pages, read Nov 30-Dec 17, 4.5 stars

96. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

This enjoyable fantasy novel has appeared on many other people's threads already this year. It's the third volume in a series; the second was my #6 for the year. On the strength of that experience, I put a hold on it at my local library as soon as that was possible, and was the first person there to get my hands on a physical copy, with two others queued behind me.

I discovered the author last year, and generally like what she writes, sometimes quite a lot, but I've read enough of her this year (6 novels) that I can also quite easily point at her habitual weak points. One of those is having difficulty keeping a sequel exciting while staying within the limitations of the world established in prior novels; her best books tend to be stand alone or first of a series. In this case, she managed to explain the changes fairly plausibly, as "many secrets were being kept", and it all ties together well enough that she may well have intended this from the beginning.

If you like fantasy stories involving magic, you may well like this series - but you should probably start with the first volume: A Deadly Education. I recommend all three.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2022
- Author: female, American, born 1973, novelist and computer programmer, already read this year
- English, public library, 407 pages, Dec 13-18, 4.5 stars

>222 ArlieS: That one sounds good. Adding it to the Someday Swamp.

>223 ArlieS: I preordered this one but haven't gotten around to it yet as I want to reread the first two books first. I might try to put it on the docket for January :)

Malaysia's branch of the 75er's wishes you and yours a happy holiday season, Arlie.

>226 PaulCranswick: Thank you Paul, and same back at you. It's going well so far.

I have somehow managed to get bored with fiction.

I have 8 library books currently checked out; 5 will be due and unrenewable on the 3rd of January. All but one of these are fiction, but I'm having trouble motivating myself to read. And it's not because these are bad books; if that were all, I'd Pearl-rule them and drop them back at the library right away.

How on earth did that happen?

97. The rise and reign of the mammals : a new history, from the shadow of the dinosaurs to us by Stephen Brusatte

Another fine book about paleontology - in this case, the origin and development of mammals. I learned a lot, much of it unknown years ago when I was in college. It also reinforced information I'd already encountered elsewhere.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science, series: n/a, 2022
- Author: male, American (living and working in Scotland), born 1984, scientist (paleontologist), another book by the same author read last year
- English, public library, 500 pages, read Dec 11-27, 4 stars

>229 ArlieS: another for the ol’ TBR…

So much of sci-fi when i wsa growing assumed that it would have to be a MANNED mission to Mars and the outer planets - I don't think even Asimov predicted how sophisticated the robotic and tele-presence planetary missions would get. Or maybe they just liked the drama.

Hard to justify a manned mission to Mars even if terraforming was in any way in the world economically viable.

Heinlein thought it was a mistake for mankind to put all its eggs in one basket - or planet. But so far that looks like how its going to be

>231 magicians_nephew: While growing up, I really didn't notice how much of the sci fi I read pretty well assumed that space was just another frontier, with all the implications and connotations of that word in the American mythos.

Science and technology were window dressing - the same story could usually be told with covered wagons, or caravels. It wasn't even generally true to the realities of exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas - just to later myths about that experience.

I suspect - but don't know - that much of the _human_ exploration and settlement came out of that mythos, and was known to be implausible even in my childhood, though not by most SF readers or even SF writers.

OTOH, I guess imagining sophisticated robots may have seemed like as much of a leap into implausibility as imagining warp drives or suspended animation. (And heavens knows, ours are still nowhere near as sophisticated as their hype, let alone as those in SF novels.)

98. Pastwatch : the redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card

This is a very good science fiction novel. Like many of this author's works, it explores unusual situations, raising issues not commonly raised by other novels - while still telling a rollicking good yarn.

You can read this one as escapism, where the good people win out in the end with the aid of implausible technology. But you can also read it as social commentary, with an interesting take on high leverage points in history, where a change could have a huge effect. And on top of that it gives vignettes of multiple examples of as-good-as-humans-can-manage cultures.

Statistics:
- Fiction, science fiction, first of a series, 1996
- Author: male, American, born 1951, novelist, read in previous year(s)
- English, public library, 351 pages, read Dec 23-29, 4 stars

Wow! I finished 98 books with 1.5 days still to go. Not bad, given the slowdown when I started playing that game.

I have two more books in flight - of 4 that will be due and unrenewable on 1/3/2023, but I doubt I'll finish either in the next two days. Fortunately, with my new rules (at post 2 of https://www.librarything.com/topic/346763#) I'll be able to count them for 2023.

Gak! My tabulations are way behind. I haven't updated the book stats in this thread (4th message) since I created the thread in April, and I haven't updated the supporting spread sheet since July (book #57).

That's probably a better use of my time this afternoon than trying to finish Noam Chomsky's Hopes and Prospects, which would be my #99 for 2022 if I read 121 more pages in the next 11 hours and 27 minutes. (It's a very dense book, and I rarely manage more than 40 pages in a day; also, I have numerous things to do today other than read.)

>235 ArlieS: I managed to tabulate my way through book 74, from late September or early October, and ran out of steam. I've updated my stats post (message 4 of this thread), but without doing my usual cross checks; it's likely that there are several omissions, and perhaps other errors.

I may well get back to this, but it will almost certainly be in 2023, when no one's still reading 2022 threads. Fortunately that's OK; the main consumer of these statistics is me.