I just finished How We Decide by Johan Lehrer.

How We Decide is one in a raft of pop sci books that use behavioural research to discuss how human behaviour departs from the theoretical rational "economic man" model.

A lot of the research discussed is actually old and I've been exposed to it in various other books, but the new twist is the Malcolm Gladwell-esque narrative pop sci spin put on it.  Not much new to see, but presented in a palatable format.

There are a number of places where Lehrer over-extends the meaning of these results.  For a start, he uses a naive view of reason, mentioning Plato's views of reason opposing emotions, and then takes that as the standard in all of western civilization.  But, as he points out himself, Plato's pupil Aristotle had a more nuanced view that held that the true reasonable man knows that both reason and emotion have their places and the struggle is to find where they should be applied.

An example of this naive view of reason can be seen in his discussion of the ultimatum game, where one party is allowed divides a reward and the other party can choose to accept the division or both parties get nothing.  Naive theories of reason like those used in basic game theory lead to the conclusion that the offerer should make a very minimal offer and that the receiver should accept it, because it is still better than nothing.  In contrast, in the real world most offerers make a much closer to even distribution and most receivers will reject the offer if it is not closer to even.  This is taken as evidence of irrationality, but it is only irrational in that it shows most people can not isolate their thinking into such an artificial context on demand.  In real world behaviour, demanding a more even split will result in better payoffs for the receiver over time, and making more even splits will result in better payoffs for the offerer over time, since they know that receivers will demand higher payoffs.  At this higher, more realistic level, the outcome is completely rational.

On the other hand, he also discusses framing effects, where the identical problem elicits a different response depending on how it is presented, clearly a sign of inconsistent and irrational behaviour.

Another weak part of the book is the section on morality.  He connects morality and emotions in a strong way, postulating that morality is based on emotional reactions to and sympathy with other people.  He lists  psychopaths as examples, since they lack emotional affect and behave in an immoral fashion.  But he doesn't give any explanation for the observed variation in morality across cultures and across time, or for the lack of serious immoral behaviour among autistics, another group that lacks emotional affect and sympathy.

There are better books on the same subject.  This one is OK if it is your first introduction to the subject.

I finished Cauldron by Jack McDevitt last week, but forgot to post about it due to work being nutz.

Cauldron continues the story of Priscilla Hutchins that started in The Engines of God.   Hutchins has gone full circle from starting out as a exploring starship pilot, to managing an academy of pilots, to retiring and fundraising and then back to pilot. 

Cauldron does a lot to resolve mysteries that have been raised in earlier McDevitt books, including that of the Omega Clouds that are the scourge of civilizations throughout the galaxy.  As such, it doesn't feel like most of his other books, which thrive on unexplained mysteries and the emptiness of space.

I finished Faith and Fire by James Swallow a few days ago.

Set in the same Warhammer 40K universe as this book,  Faith and Fire is better written.  The action scenes are clearer, the characters are better written and the plot fits together more easily. 

These novels all have to walk a fine line, since the side of evil is over the top evil while the side of good is a fascist, oppressive and grotesque theocracy.  The obvious way to maneuver around this is to have one of the powerful good characters turn out to be the real villain.  I guess that could be considered a spoiler, but only if you weren't paying attention, since the suspicious nature of this character is obvious from the start.

Overall, a decent novel, but one that only caters to a very specialized taste.  

I just finished The Wheel of Darkness by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. 

I've read a few of the Preston/Child's books - Relic, Reliquary and The Cabinet of Curiosities.  They are all techno-thrillers to one degree or another, usually overlapping with serial killers and some kind of mysticism.

This one is no exception, as a dangerous object is stolen from a Tibetan monastery and the killer escapes on a new ocean liner, followed by FBI agent Pendergast.  Pendergast has moved from being an odd minor character, to being the focus of their novels, of which The Wheel of Darkness is on the tail end. 

Nothing unexpected here, but an OK read given that.

I just finished Sideshow by Sherri S. Tepper.

Sideshow follows Raising the Stones and Grass, ultimately tying up the fates of all the characters and species from those novels and leading to the ultimate destiny for humanity.

The plot follows on from Raising the Stones, where the fungal network known as the Hobb's Land God is spreading throughout human systems.  One group decides that it must isolate itself from the network on a distant world, in order to preserve their diversity and work on the question of human destiny.  They go so far as to have enforcers whose job is to maintain diversity and the status quo. 

The novels starts when things have started to go wrong, the world is taking a dark turn and strange creatures are showing up and interfering with the populace.

It's a good book, but not as involving as the previous two.
 

Last night I finished The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson.

More accurately, I finished re-reading it, since this is one of my favourite books.

I read the book first in 1997, while working on my MBA, before I moved down to Silicon Valley and before the dot-com boom and bust.  Moving to Silicon Valley added a new layer to the book for me, since I the locations changed from generic mental images to real memories of actual places.

This book, along with Bronson's other novel, Bombadiers, is a rare beast - a work of fiction that is about business.  It follows some engineers who split off from a foundation to start their own company, and their rivalry with the top designer from the foundation.  It has a very light, comedic touch but still has some emotional resonance and interesting characters, similar to some of the works of Douglas Coupland.

Sadly, Bronson has moved away from fiction writing.  His non-fiction works have all been excellent, but I would trade them all for some more novels any day.

I finished Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow a few days ago.

I've read a number of Morrow's books, mentioned here, here, here, and here.  This one is different from all of those.  His other books are heavy on the philosophical discussions and implications, while this one feels like a much lighter weight, and shorter, satire.

It's set just before the end of WW2, and postulates that the US had developed Godzilla like creatures that it might need to unleash on Japan since the atomic program isn't going well.  An schlock horror film actor used to portraying monsters is recruited to give a mock demonstration to the Japanese big wigs. 

The book follows his adventures leading up to the demonstration, and afterwards. 

It's a fun romp, particularly if you're a fan of early monster movies.

I just finished Raising the Stones by Sherri S. Tepper.'

Raising the Stones tells the story of the rise of the Hobbs Land Gods, some kind of fungus based group organism that creates a harmonious, productive society around it.  This comes about on Hobbs Land, an agricultural settlement planet in a under-defined solar system with many planets, connected by teleporting "Doors".  This harmonious society comes into conflict with the Voordsteders, a repressive patriarchal society meant to be derived from the remnants of the Judeo-Christian/Islamic beliefs.

Set in the future of the same universe as Grass,  this isn't really a sequel since it neither involves any of the same characters or follows directly from the events of Grass.  It's a very well told story, though the overly strong patriarchal versus matriarchal themes were a distraction.

I just finished Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin.

Knots and Crosses is set in Edinburgh, like the 44 Scotland Street series I like so much but provides a very contrasting view of the city.  It is a mystery, of the serial killer/police procedural variety, starring the very depressed and disturbed Inspector Rebus.  Rebus is an SAS veteran who left it under mysterious circumstances and forced his way onto the police force.  He gets more closely involved in a serial killer investigation that ends up being tied to his personal life.

In general, it provides a much seedier view of Edinburgh, focusing on the poor, the perverted and the drug addled.

I expected more from this book, given that it spawned one of the most successful series of mysteries in the UK.

Yesterday I finished Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Helperin.

Game Change aims to be the definitive narrative of the 2008 US presidential election, cover the Democrat and Republican primaries and the general election, but in reality it is mainly focused on the Obama/Clinton race to be the Democrat nominee.  That contest takes up close to 10x amount of the book as the Republican side of the primaries, and around 5x the amount of the book dedicated to the McCain/Obama contest for the general election.

It's also clear that the losing sides had a lot more disgruntled sources that were willing to dish up dirt on their respective campaigns.  On the other hand, the Obama camp moved from running a disciplined campaign to running a disciplined administration, giving them much more of an opportunity and better leverage to keep people from sharing too much.

The result is that the Clinton and McCain camps are portrayed warts and all while the Obama campaign is still "on message" - there is more detail than was available at the time, but none of it contradicts the standard Obama image.

It's still an interesting book for anyone who followed the 2008 presidential race, but the one sided nature undermines it thoroughly.

I just finished The World According to Bertie by Alexander McCall Smith, the 4th book in the 44 Scotland Street series.

No major changes to the series - some of the characters come, and others go.  It's as enjoyable as the rest, although the fates of Mathew and Pat seem to undermine what happened in the previous book in an odd way.

I just finished Crime Stories and Other Writings by Dashiell Hammett.

I've read Hammett's novels before, and enjoyed most of them (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man being the exceptions), but never his short stories.  Hammett was known for being the best of the hard boiled/private eye school of writing that overthrew the "drawing room" style mysteries featuring the rich (in America) or upper class (in the UK) characters in mostly intellectual exercises and brought the "mysteries" back to being about crime and criminals.  But for all that, these stories have a remarkably similar feel to the Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories written in the previous century.  As they went on, the violence became more prominent and graphic, and they substitute the nameless Continental Op's (Hammett's detective of choice) knowledge of human motives and criminal habits for Holmes' minutiae based deductions, but the basic form and feel are there.

Quite enjoyable, though difficult to read one after the other.  They start to feel repetitive and overly familiar.  Best read in multiple sittings.

Last night, we went to see Mahealani Uchiyama with the Ka Ua Tuahine Polynesian Dance Company at Ashkenaz.

It was a really interesting show.  The music was a mix of Hawaiian/Polynesian/Jazz/Blues/World music and about 50% of the songs were accompanied by the dancers, who did these amazing, complicated dances.

Yesterday I finished Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner.

This is the third book in a series started with Fleet of Worlds and continuing with Juggler of Worlds, novels set in Niven's Known Space universe. 

I enjoyed the first two books in the series, but had problems with both.  The first one wasn't as engaging as it could have been, and messed with previous Known Space events in a bad way, and the second book continued that trend much too much.

Luckily, it feels like Lerner and Niven are finally hitting their stride with this series.  First, it has only minimal references to previous stories/characters.  Second, when it does mention them, it doesn't undermine them, or change them.  Instead it just uses them as a base for new ideas.  Third, the story itself is much more compelling than the previous two. 

I really enjoyed this book, and want to see where the story goes from here.

I just finished True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass: Jimmy Martin by Tom Piazza.

This is a very short book, essentially a reprint of a magazine article from Oxford American with an introduction and some essays added at the end.

But for all it's brevity, it is a must have for Jimmy Martin fans.  Martin has a reputation as being a trouble maker, and this book has some great examples from a trip the author and Jimmy made to the Grand Ole Opry.  Jimmy starts out drunk, berates Ricky Skaggs, and nearly fights another musician.  At the same time, he exchanges warm greetings with many others.

I just finished Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb.

Dragon Keeper is set in the same world as her previous FarSeer, Liveship Traders and Tawny Man trilogies.  It follows the events at the end of the last two trilogies but none of the main characters of those series are main characters here.  Instead, it follows a few new characters - a disgruntled wife of a trader who is also a dragon scholar, the captain of a barge, and a young girl who is an outcast.  All three get involved in helping some dragons move from where they were born to a more suitable location.

Hobb is still an excellent writer and in fact this book is better than her previous Soldier's Son trilogy.  A lot of it feels like setup for the journey up river that starts in the second half, and will continue in the second book in the series.  While her characters seem generic from a high level description, her writing makes them feel well rounded and unique, even while being familiar.

The only flaw I found in this book was that unlike her others, this one is not a self contained story.  It ends abruptly without resolving anything or making a complete story.  In contrast, the books in her other trilogies all stand alone as novels while working as parts of a larger story.

Last night I finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

This is probably the grimmest book I have ever read.  Set in a post-apocalyptic world, and featuring two nameless characters referred to as simple "the man" and "the boy", it's never made clear what happened to the world, just that almost everything, including plants and animals, was killed.

This adds a little bit of a fresh spin, if a gruesome one, to the post-apocalyptic genre since, if there are no animals, the only food is leftover stored food or other people, and the book takes place in a time when most old stores of food have already been looted.

The protagonists are trying to make it to the coast, and head south on the road, to avoid the effects of a coming winter.  What they did in the previous winters is never made clear.  Also never made clear is how they got enough stored food to survive the last few years, or how old the boy is, since he was born after the apocalypse. 

The book is a compelling read, but left me with little afterwords.  

Yesterday I finished Jhegaala by Steven Brust.

Jhegaala is the eleventh book in the Vlad Taltos series.  Sadly, this seems to be a series that I appreciate less as I grow older.

The book are heavily on internal dialogue and ruminations, and therefore tend to cover very little ground in terms of plot.  Jhegaala is basically a noir mystery, like Hammett's Red Harvest.  Vlad comes to a town in the East, accidentally starting a series of deaths as the locals take him to be more than he is.  By the end, he unravels what happened and defeats the locals who run things.

The book depend heavily on the flavour given in the dialogues and ruminations, and it is those that are not aging well for me.  Where I found the first books very amusing and enjoyable, the later ones mainly feel repetitive and whiny. 

I'll keep reading, as the books do vary in quality and I can hope for the best, and to see where the series as a whole ends up.

I just finished Grass by Sheri S. Tepper.

I read Tepper's True Game series when I was very young - 13 or 14 - and really liked it.  After that series, her books drifted from what I was looking for and I haven't really gone back until now.  I had picked up another book, Sideshow,  but stopped reading it right away when I realized it was actually the third book in a series.  I went back to start with the first book, Grass.

Grass tells the story of the humans who live on a planet covered by plains, and where there is a symbiotic, and not entirely healthy, relationship going on between the humans and the aliens who live there, mainly expressed through a regular "Hunt".  At the same time, humans elsewhere are starting to be effected by a form of plague for which no cure can be found.  The people on Grass seem to be immune, which draws the attention of a the theocratic government that dominates most of humanity.

It's an interesting book, and I look forward to the sequels.

I just finished a blacksmithing class at the Crucible.  Previously, I'd taken a welding overview course there, but this was a more focused, and detailed course.

It was project based - over the five week course, we made a hook, knife, spoon and fork.  I didn't quite get done the fork, so only the other three are shown below.

Overall, the class was really good.  The art of "heating up metal and then hitting it with a hammer" is interesting to learn, and to try on actual projects. The project based nature of the class has good and bad points.  The good part is that it gives you a completed piece to look at at the end of each class. The bad part was that it makes a lot of the learning implicit, i.e. you have to think about what you are doing and try to draw the lessons, rather than having them pointed out to you.  This was made a little worse by the fact that the teachers weren't very focused on giving feedback.  They demonstrated the project, and then were available if you had specific questions.  I think it would have been better if they spent more time checking up on each student in a more rigorous fashion.

I'm going to do the next level class, which is a supposed to be a little less project oriented and have more theoretical information.

Yesterday I finished Evil for Evil by K.J. Parker.

This is the second book in a trilogy.  I wrote about the first one here back in 2008.

This book continues directly after the first one ended, when one kingdom had fallen after defending a refugee from their more industrialized neighbour.  Some of the people, and the refugee, fled to a second neighbouring kingdom and this book continues the refugee's plan, whose details are not revealed until the end of the book, and develops some new characters around him, including the leader of the second kingdom.

It works pretty well, mostly focusing on the political and logistical efforts to find a way to defeat or avoid battle with the industrialized nation.  Like the first book in the series, it has some interesting descriptions of early technology, delving into mining, manufacturing and pottery making.

I just finished Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.

Spin starts out with the earth being encapsulated, and ends with a race to emigrate to another planet.  In between, it follows three people tied together by their history.  Two are rich - a brother and sister  - and the third is the poorer son of a family friend, who hangs around.  They witness the encapsulation as kids, when the stars disappear one night, and the genius brother gets heavily involved in figuring out what happened.  There is a mostly non-consumated, very slow and contradictory relationship between the other two.

The book works on a number of levels - the characters are believable and interesting, and what has happened to the Earth is intriguing and makes for an interesting background.

Some of Wilson's other books suffer from being too cerebral and reading very cold, making them hard to feel really involved with.  You can feel the same thing around the edges of this book, but it manages to overcome it in the end, making it one of his most effective.

I just finished The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

 I wrote about his previous two books here and here.  This book is more focused, and shorter, than both of his other ones.  Instead of being built out of essays written for magazines, this one feels like one piece of work.

It focuses on how checklists can be used to manage important tasks, whether they are simple, complicated or complex.  As a devout believer in checklists, it was a little preaching to the choir for me, but there were still some good sections.  The parts on what makes a good checklist versus a bad one, and the thoughts on the different types and uses of checklists were interesting and might show up in my work life.

One possible issue - he uses three main areas for checklist discussion - medicine, aviation and construction.  One thing he doesn't spend any time on is the fact that in two of those fields, time is often of the essence.  The book would have been well served in having a discussion of how checklists differ in those circumstances from other activities, like construction, where time is not an issue but consistency over repeated action is.

Last night I finished Love Over Scotland, the third 44 Scotland Street book by Alexander McCall Smith.

I loved the first book in the series but didn't enjoy the second one anywhere near as much. 

I'm not sure if the reason I didn't like the second one had to do with the book, and it's focus on a bunch of characters I didn't find very interesting, or my mood at the time.  In either case, I like the third book nearly as much as the second.  It focuses more on interesting characters - Pat, the girl with the thing for bad boys, Mathew, the rich gallery owner, Bertie, the 6 year old prodigy, and Angus Lorie and his dog, Cyril.

The events in this third book felt more consequential to the characters, while the second book felt more like a space filler between plot ideas.  Another facet of these books that I'm coming to appreciate more and more is the use of poetry.  A number of the characters refer regularly to poetry, usually Scottish, in a very reverential way.

Highly recommended.

I finished The Master Executioner by Loren D. Estleman a few days ago.

Technically considered a "western", Estleman's books are more like historical fiction that happen to be set the Old West.  They aren't stories of cowboys, gun fights and range wars but stories about characters who feel real.  In this case, it's a carpenter who ends up an executioner, losing his family along the way.

Good book about a man who finds the perfect career for himself, whether or not it is good for him.

Last night I finished Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns.

This biography of Ayn Rand focuses on her relationship to the American right wing movements that started around the Great Depression, from her involvement with the presidential campaigns of Wendell Wilkie and Barry Goldwater to the inspiration she gave to libertarian/anarchists like Murray Rothbard.

In every other way, Heller's similarly timed book is better or the same.  Heller's writing is better, her parts on the novels are stronger and she depends too heavily on the testimony of suspect witnesses.  Burns may have a slight edge on the last item.  A lot of her book has to do with Rand's relationships with other right wing figures, and therefore she can use not only Rand's correspondence but those of the other figures.  This gives her a stronger base to work from.  She also had extensive access to the Ayn Rand Archives. 

The real weakness of Burn's book comes from the fact that she has a superficial, at best, understanding of Rand's ideas.  This makes her descriptions of Rand's development of those ideas suspect, and leads to some odd comparisons or discussions that don't make sense to a more experienced reader. 

A few days ago, I finished Old School, a novel by Tobias Wolff.

Tobias Wolff is also the author of one of my favourite books, This Boy's Life.  That book is an actual memoir and, while this book is not literal memoir, it feels like one.  The protagonist has things in common with the author - being a poorer kid attending an elite prep school, leaving during senior year, and serving in Vietnam - but it is not actually Wolff's life.

The book feels very episodic, based around the visits of three authors: Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway.  The students at the prep school get a chance to meet privately with the authors if their stories are contest winners.  The protagonist tries for all three prizes but gets foiled along the way.

An OK, but very slight book.  Nowhere near as powerful as his actual memoir.

I've been swamped at work, so I haven't had time to post, but last week I finished Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith.

This is the second of his 44 Scotland Street series, which I wrote about here.  

The second book is not as strong as the first - it focuses almost exclusively on characters I'm less interested in, like the prodigy Bertie and his family, and the older conservative Ramsey Dunbarton, and some of the other characters, like Domenica, comes across less sympathetically.

It does continue some strong gags, like the Pollock's missing car, that are very amusing.

Hopefully the rest of the series will be more like the first than the second book.

I just finished Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane (soon to be a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio).

In some ways a pretty standard genre thriller (US Marshals go to a mental hospital on an isolated island to investigate a disappearance, things are more complicated than they seem, they get trapped on the island, etc.) but it turns out to have a twist.

SPOILER ALERT

It turns out to use another genre cliche, the unreliable narrator. But Lehane has walked into a classic trap - this kind of cliche is only appreciated by readers when done in as minimal a fashion as possible. The larger an author makes this, and the cleverer they are in its implementation, the more the readers will hate them for it.

When the twist is revealed at the end, that the main protagonist is actually a mental patient and the events of the story have been a combination of the staff putting on an act to help him work through his psychosis, and actual hallucinated episodes, everything that comes before it is undermined. The reader has spent an entire novel sympathizing with, or rooting for, the protagonist and the rug is completely pulled out from under them. It can't but leave an unsettled and unsatisfied feeling in many readers.

Yesterday, I finished The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics by James Valliant.

This book has been out for a while, and I only had a slight interest in it. While reading Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made, I was bothered by how much she depended on inputs from Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, who seem to have a vested interest in misrepresenting Rand in certain ways. Since this is the topic of Valliant's book (called PARC for short), my interest was renewed and I tracked down a copy in order to confirm or disprove my suspicions.

Valliant's book does an excellent job of laying out the case against the Brandens. The first half deals mostly with the Branden's own statements, whether as part of the books they have published on Rand, or separate statements they have made over the years. This part does a masterful job of dismantling both Branden's claims. Valliant himself puts it perfectly:

Many of the claims made in the Branden's books are undoubtedly true. A good many of them are demonstrably false, misleading, one-sided and self-serving. Being unclear as to their sources -- often overtly suppressing their sources -- it is not generally possible to distinguish the true from the false and therein lies the problem for the usefulness of these works to historians.

Valliant shows that the Brandens claims contradict other sources (compare their views of Rand and her moods with those of Charles and Mary Ann Sures in Facets of Ayn Rand), contradict external records (compare Barbara Branden's description of Ayn Rand's appearance on Donahue with the video recording of the actual show) and even contradict themselves extensively (too many cases to give just one).

The second half of the book uses Ayn Rand's private journals, preserved in the Ayn Rand Archives and only made available in recent years, to give the other side of the story of the last few years of the Branden/Rand relationship and its end. This section of the book is harder reading, partially because Ayn Rand's journals use Objectivist terms and short hand and partially due to Valliant's writing style, which is more suited to his job as a prosecutor rather than a historian at times. But the overall impact is to heighten the sense of exactly how deceptive the Brandens were, particularly Nathaniel Branden, and how they both exploited Rand to create opportunities for themselves.

Returning to the topic of Heller's book, reading them together is particularly damaging to Heller. She uses PARC in her end notes, so she must have read it, but she provides no counter argument or justification of why she took the Branden's inputs at face value. She may have just used PARC as a way to get access to the information quoted from Rand's journals, since she claims she was denied direct access (an odd claim in itself, since Jennifer Burns, another independent researched was given access and significant help from the archivist, in a similar time frame). The overall impression I am left with is that Heller chose to use the Branden's inputs because they made for a more dramatic story, rather than because they were most likely true.

I just finished 44 Scotland Street by Alexander McCall Smith.

Originally a daily serial in The Scotsman, this collects them all into a single novel with short chapters. The chapters hold together well enough that I don't think most people would even realize it was a serial if they weren't told beforehand.

I've read the first books in two of his other series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and The Sunday Philosopher's Club, but this is my favourite of his works so far. Like the Ladies Detective Agency books, it is a slice of life novel, but without mysteries attached. It follows an interlocking group of characters in Edinburgh through a couple of weeks/months of their lives. It's well written and interesting, in a low key kind of way, similar to the books of Maeve Binchy.

The only thing that was a little off putting is that it has the wandering point of view problem that I noticed in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, where the text will be following one character, inside their head, and then abruptly switch to another character's thoughts/feelings to get their reaction. But this is a minor quibble in an otherwise very enjoyable book.

This was an excellent recommendation from a friend.

Last night I finished Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh.

I don't know if this is set in the same universe as the other two books (Rimrunners and Heavy Time), since it starts with a starship going off course, getting lost and having to settle on an already occupied planet.

The feel of this book is completely different from the other two. It still uses a very limited first person perspective, but it isn't as frantic or claustrophobic feeling as the other two. After a few introductory settings, the main character acts as an interface between the humans and the aliens. The humans are isolated on an island to keep them from interacting with the aliens, a state of affairs that came about after misunderstandings between the two races led to a war.

In some ways, the aliens are very human-like, humanoid but larger. I think this is done to add emphasis to the narrators thoughts on how fundamentally different they are beneath the surface. The aliens do not have the same kind of emotions as humans, resulting in a very different political setup.

The book is a little frustrating to read, because during a lot of it the narrator is ignorant of what is really going on around him, and is very passive as well. He is spirited from place to place, and only has his speculations about why things are happening. Towards the end, as the part of the story about the human/alien differences develops, it gets more interesting. And by the end, we know the reasons for the other characters actions.

It looks like a long series, and I'm mixed about getting in to it, but I will probably try at least one more.

A few days ago, I finished Life Inc. by Douglas Rushkoff.

I felt so strongly about it, that it has taken me a few days to organize my thoughts, but at bottom they are this: ignore the glowing quotes on the back, this is an extremely stupid book.

The subtitle, "How the world became a corporation and how to take it back", is unexpected enough to make it sound intriguing but even a reading of the foreword should make readers who are paying attention take notice that of the author's shallow thought process. Early on, he compares a neigbourhood being gentrified to a country being colonized. That may seem like a trivial comparison, but the lack of understanding of the essentials on an issue exhibited there is typical of everything else in this book. Similarly, he compares loans from the World Bank/IMF with gunship diplomacy and loans from the mob. Again - the essential difference eludes him. If a country defaults on loans from the IMF, the worst that will happen is that they don't receive any more loans. If you default on loans to the mob, they will burn down your business and kill your family. Do those seem like they are essentially the same thing?

Early on he comments on chartered companies and how they were granted monopolies by the state. Throughout the book, he associates these with corporations even though modern corporations, outside of public utilities, are not granted monopolies.

Again, and again he misrepresents people, or things. He quotes John D. Rockefeller talking about how he believed God had given him his ability to make money, but prefaces it to say he is bragging about monopolies even though the quote doesn't mention them at all.

He talks about the Secret, the Oprah promoted New Age mumbo jumbo that believes positive thinking can literally shape your life. I can understand criticizing this junk, but he does it not because of its ridiculous magical thinking but because it is too egotistic!

His main thesis is that starting with the Renaissance, corporations have corrupted not only the business world but the way people look at themselves and everything else. The Renaissance is picked as a starting point mainly for the reason that this is a time that some places moved from using a mix of local and national currencies to using government fiat central currency. The role of government fiat central currency seems to be a major bee in his bonnet. Of course, a good clue to deciding if someone is a crank is if they are not an economist but want to tell you about their theories that society is messed up mainly because of monetary theory. If you think I'm exaggerating, notice that he blames changes in monetary policy for the plague that devastated Europe in the 14th century.

His confusion on political and economic points is astounding. Throughout the book he gives example after example of how corporations, working governments (or governments, working with corporations) collude against everyone else, but it never occurs to him that the problem is government having this kind of power in the first place, instead he thinks we should do away with corporations. He seems to have no understanding of the difference between actual free market policies and mercantilist ones (or "corporatist", as he calls it). He also states explicitly that the work of almost all economists is bunk, including free market advocates like Hayek, because they did their work in the context of a government fiat currency, ignoring history of comment on exactly that issue, and ignoring that Hayek's work on price as information would apply under local currencies as well as under fiat ones.

He talks about how corporations created a lot of the drive for individual, rather than community satisfaction and desires, including the desire for owning a house. He goes on to prove his point by quoting that noted corporate shill, Walt Whitman!

Page after page, he gives some ridiculous sounding fact or interpretation, and if you try to go to the end notes to find out where this comes from, you will mostly find nothing. The end notes are very short with gaps of multiple pages between notes in most cases. Most of his claims are totally undocumented in any way. For example, he claims that the Rand Corporations secretaries that were the original subjects of Prisoner's Dilemma experiments didn't act the way they were expected to and cooperated instead of betraying each other. Sounds like an interesting fact, if true. The end notes give no source, and no way of tracking down where it came from. Similarly, he claims that most medievalists agree that European quality of life between the 11th and 13th century was higher than even today, due to the use of local currencies. Again, no end notes or citations.

While reading this book, it felt somewhat familiar, though I was sure I had not read it before. Then I realized what it was - it reminded me of Behold A Pale Horse, by the confirmed nut bag William Cooper. From the misapplication of technical theories (monetary in this case, electrical in Cooper's book), to the habit of jumping from fact to fact on superficial resemblances and then tying them together into a grand theory, this book reveals itself as a modern example of conspiracy theory.

Last night we went to see The Threepenny Opera, put on by Berkeley's Shotgun Players.


I haven't seen The Threepenny Opera before, so some of my comments here are about the play itself, rather than this staging. The story is a strange and silly little adaptation of a story from the 18th century, with the antihero nature of Macheath, "Mack The Knife" amped up. The lyrics give forth a depressing and squalid view of life, but are married to memorable tunes in a way that makes them enjoyable and ironic. Macheath is described as viscous, a rapist and murderer, but he is portrayed as a sometimes gallant, sometimes weaselly free spirit since none of his more terrible acts are shown on stage. This allows the audience to cheer for him, rather than wanting to see him executed.

The production marries a punk ethos to Brecht's Marxist lyrics in a way that seems obvious in retrospect, but I can't find any online discussions of it being done before. The result is a brutal but vital looking play with more energy than is good for it at times. The opening rendition of "Mack The Knife" is sold so energetically and "punk" that it almost ruins the song itself. Other songs have the background singers/dancers pounding around in such chaos that a similar result ensues. Thankfully, this is not true of some of the other numbers, such as "Pirate Jenny", which is sung beautifully by Kelsey Venter, who plays Polly Peachum. In general, Venter's numbers were all highlights. She went for a more restrained approach, allowing her powerful voice and the lyrics/music to create the moment, instead of a punk schtick overselling the emotion.

The brutal look, with prostitute's having visible bruises on their face and limbs and beggars having exaggerated torn clothes and dirty faces, was distracting at times, acting against the story. At other times, it worked better, giving weight to lyrics that describe their brutal lives and underscoring descriptions of Macheath's brutality.

Overall, it's a good production with some strong standouts. I'd recommend you go see it, but even it's extended run is sold out. There are a few tickets that come up for sale just before show time, but from listening to others in the line/lobby, they seemed difficult to get.

A few days ago I finished Heavy Time by C.J. Cherryh.

It's set in the same universe as Rimrunners, but in a very different time and place. This one is set in our solar system and involves miners working on asteroids. It starts with a distress call that two miners answer hoping for salvage and instead find one person still alive. That person is very damaged - not only physically, but mentally out of whack after having spent months trying to survive. The rest of the book follows the miners as they return to base, try to claim there salvage, and deal with the oppressive company that runs the mining operations and has secrets to protect.

It was more enjoyable than Rimrunners, though the point of view of the disturbed character gets old after a while. He slowly recovers, but the emphasis is on slowly.

Cherryh's approach is interesting, because she keeps things at a very low level and therefore her plots are more intimate and cover less ground than many SF works. I will probably keep reading these books, since they make good stand alone SF novels as well as contributing to a nicely varied and deep background universe.

This morning I finished Personal Injuries by Scott Turow.

Another excellent book from Turow. While technically in the legal thriller genre, Turow's characters are so real that they elevate his works well beyond that genre. His plots are also a stand out, avoiding the cliches and action packed finales that show up in a lot of genre writing.

This one involves the efforts of a DA to bring down a number of crooked judges in Kindle County, the setting of all Turow's books. In an unexpected choice, the protagonist is actually the defense attorney of the lawyer who is pushed into being an informant. He is almost totally passive in the book, serving almost exclusively as a conduit to tell others story, mainly that of the informant and the FBI agent that has to shadow him as he tries to get the crooked judges and civil servants to expose themselves on tape.

In addition to being a great read with some wonderful, complex characters, it also serves as a procedural for how complex investigations can play out, with interesting but believable twists and turns along the way.

This is posted as solidarity with those being attacked by radical Muslims for drawing/publishing a cartoon. Viva free speech!

There are articles about the latest attacks here and here.

I just finished Man of Constant Sorrow by Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean.

It's obvious from reading it that it is really Eddie Dean writing up and connecting together stories told to him by Dr. Stanley. At times, there are sentences or pieces of stories repeated in different chapters but 0ther than that, he does a very good job of weaving the stories together into a coherent narrative.

Like all autobiographies, this book can be a little too self serving. Ralph clearly sees himself as someone who says it the way he sees it, and he has a lot of regard for himself as a musician and a "living legend". It also has some holes that you wouldn't find in a more objective biography - there is only a single sentence mentioning his first marriage and his son, Ralph Stanley II, is only mentioned briefly in the last chapter.

I am a huge fan of the Stanley Brothers -- they are my favourite bluegrass band, by far -- so the earlier parts of the books were very interesting to me. Learning where some of their songs came from, and about the hard times they lived through, even up to and past Carter's death, as well as a lot of other facts about their lives, probably wouldn't suit some audiences but it was perfect for me.

Most of the other original bluegrass stars, like Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Jimmy Martin, are gone and it is a shame we don't have a record of their stories as told by them. It is a great thing for bluegrass that at least one of them went on the record and told it like they saw it.

Highly recommended for bluegrass fans.

Yesterday I finished Rimrunners by C. J. Cherryh.

I haven't read any Cherryh in a long time, and didn't remember liking her all that much, but I enjoyed this book.

It follows Elizabeth "Bet" Yeager as she tries to get a job on a ship, not really caring where it goes, as long as it is away from the station she is trapped on with no prospects and no money. Eventually, she finds a birth on a ship, forms some friendships, gets into trouble and then helps fend off an attack. All this is made much more difficult because she is a former Marine with the opposing military, something she tries to conceal from her new crew mates.

The book starts off slowly, with her stuck on the station and dealing with other reprobates and getting more and more despondent. The situation only gets slightly less grim as she gets a job on a ship where there are massive crew problems, including violence. The grim tone is a little off putting as well. But the book picks up as it goes along and has a strong conclusion.

Last night I finished Revelation Space, the debut novel of Alastair Reynolds.

Revelation Space has a "space opera" feel, but with more of a hard science fiction background. For example, there is no faster than light travel here but there is aggressive nanotechnology and other exotic science ideas.

It's quite an enjoyable book, once it gets going, and a surprisingly good debut. At the beginning, the multiple story lines were a big bewildering, particularly because they moved around in time in unclear ways. Leaving things un-explained at the start is a common SF writing style, but if not done carefully, it can be very off putting. Once you get past that, and the stories start to flow individually, and then come together, the novel improves a lot. The end also has some flaws, as the amount of exposition increases almost exponentially, pulling away from the story/characters at times but necessary to explain what is going on.

The story itself is pretty complex, starting with an archaeological find, an assasin and a spaceship needing a crew replacement. Later there are coup's on colonies, clones revealed, battles between AIs for people's minds, aliens that turn out to be different than what they appear and a final decision that needs to be made.

Last night we say the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience at the Freight & Salvage.

It was a great show, by a great group of local musicians - David Grisman, Keith Little, Jim Nunally, Chad Manning and Sam Grisman. They did two sets mixed between bluegrass standards and Grisman originals.

I've seen other shows of DGBX but this was the best one so far. In addition, it was good to see the new Freight full. I've seen two other shows there with very small crowds, but this one was sold out.

The new Freight is a great place to see music. I liked the old Freight because of the great acts they got, but I never liked the sound there. The new Freight is not only very nice to look at, but has excellent sound.

Year In Review - 2009

My favourite book I read this year:

Perfecting Sound Forever by Greg Milner. As I said at the time, "Well written, well researched, overall excellent".

My favourite concert I attended this year:

It was a year of great concerts with Devo, Hot Club of Cowtown, Audie Blaylock and Redline, Town Mountain and others, but there was one clear winner - Heaven and Hell, the Dio version of Black Sabbath, at the Warfield. Seeing musicians like this at a smaller venue, was simply amazing and exceeded my high expectations.

My favourite movie I saw this year:

On the other hand, it was a weak year for movies. Nothing I saw this year really blew me away. I guess I would have to give the top spot to UP. It's not as strong as Pixar's other movies, but still better than most of the dreck Hollywood puts out these days. I guess I need to see more non-Hollywood films.

My favourite place visited this year:

Another strong category, from the natural scenery of Jasper and Banff, to my first trip to the mega-city of London, but my favourite is easy - Edinburgh. I wrote about it here, here and here with pictures here. A wonderful, colourful and historic city with the nicest people I've met in my trips to Europe.

Most unexpected experience this year:

Jury duty - I went into it expecting to be bored by the realities of a courtroom but I came out of it with a new respect and interest in the legal field. In many ways, it was more interesting than how it is portrayed on fiction.

I'm running a little behind in reviews, even though it has been the Christmas vacation and I've been off work.

The second last book I finished was Anne Perry's No Graves As Yet. It is built around two brothers, one a pastor and teacher at Cambridge, the other a government agent for the Secret Intelligence Service (later to be called MI6). The book starts with the death of their parents, who were coming to tell the spy brother about a conspiracy, and is complicated by the death of a Cambridge student.

In some ways, it is an old fashioned British mystery, set amongst the upper class before the Great War. But it spends a lot more time developing the characters of the two brothers as they go about figuring out if their parents were killed, who killed the student, and if the deaths are related. It's quite well written, and works as a stand alone book, although it is actually the start of a multi-book series.

It does feel a bit lopsided by the end, as one brother is dropped from the narrative for most of the second half and only re-appears at the end.

The last book I finished is Clarke County, Space by Allen Steele. I had read it before, many years ago but had misplaced my copy.

This book is part of his series of loosely related near future books (called the Near Space or Rude Astronauts series). These were Steele's attempt to bring near future SF "back to Earth", in a sense. They are grittier and more realistic than much SF, and use a lot of background Steele learned as a journalist covering the US space program. It is set on an orbiting station just as it decides to break away from its position as a US colony, and as a hitman pursues a fugitive aboard.

I wish Steele would go back to writing in this world, as it was quite interesting and is still different from most SF books. He has since moved on to other series, mainly the Coyote books, which I don't enjoy as much.

Yesterday we saw Avatar in IMAX 3D.

It's quite a spectacle. The whole $280M is up on the screen. The 3D is the best I've seen, although it still makes things look disjointed at times to me. The CGI for the Na'vi has successfully crossed the "uncanny valley".

On the more artistic front, the performances are good and James Cameron still has an amazing touch with action sequences. On the other hand, his writing skills haven't shown much improvement. Science fiction involves a willing suspension of disbelief, but Cameron shows off an ignorance of physics, ecology, economics, history and military tactics that makes that suspension pretty difficult. The story adds up to Dances With Wolves but where the Indians win at the end.

Overall, worth seeing. It makes me wish that this level of technical skill would be used for some science fiction classics with better stories, like Larry Niven's Ringworld.

We just got back from seeing the new Sherlock Holmes movie, aptly titled Sherlock Holmes.

Overall it was an enjoyable movie, with some weak parts. Given the weakness of the other modern film versions of Sherlock Holmes (the Chris Columbus penned Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985 and the middling funny Without A Clue in 1988)

The look of the film is a highlight. The backgrounds and street scenes are reportedly all digital effects, but don't feel like it at all - it feels like an immersive Victorian world.

Some of the reviews have disparaged the more action oriented Holmes interpretation, but I think it is a valid one. The stories do talk about Holmes skills in Baritsu (an English martial art) and boxing and he actually gets in a few fights and scuffles in the canonical stories. Other reviews have faulted this version as not being "fastidious" enough, but that is also straight out of the stories. Holmes, as written, is extremely sloppy and disorganized outside of his professional areas, experiments with chemicals in his apartments and the scene where he shoots V.R. (for Victoria Regina) into one wall of the apartment is straight from Conan Doyle.

Where the Holmes portrayal does show real weakness is its fundamentally modern nature. Holmes, Watson and the other characters are sarcastic, ironic, egalitarian and overly expressive in contrast to how a true Victorian would have acted. This is especially telling because Holmes' lack of decorum is meant to be more meaningful in contrast to people who behave in a much more reserved fashion.

Which may have contributed to another problem, Robert Downey Jr's performance. Downey is over the top in Holmes lack of social skills, and his main approach to act out eccentricity seems to be twitching in various ways. This may also be due to him trying to distinguish his performance from his other current major role, the much cooler and sartorial Tony Stark.

The story adds up as well or better than most mainstream Hollywood stories, but does feature one really odd choice - the black magic ritual that Holmes interrupts at the start of the movie. Given how prominently a similar ritual was featured in the earlier Young Sherlock Holmes, this feels very derivative. After that, the following mysteries are better and the interplay between Holmes and Watson as Watson plans to move out pre-marriage works fairly well.

The introduction of Irene Adler as Holmes romantic weakness/arch rival works OK, once you've adapted to the modern perfomances. The treatment of the female characters (Irene Adler and Mary Morstan) is also very modern - they are independent, opinionated women and treated with respect from those around them, definitely not what would have happened if played with a period flavour. And once again, the general treatment undermines a specific character. Irene Adler is meant to be shockingly independent and aggressive, but how shocking is it when all the women are similar? It takes away from the uniqueness of the character.

But it is easier to point out in length the weaknesses, the strengths are on the screen, and it is an enjoyable film if you can get past the modernized Holmes and friends.

Just before Christmas, I finished Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller.

It's a very interesting biography in many ways. Rand lived an interesting life, living through the communist revolution in China and then turning herself into what she wanted to be, first a success in Hollywood and then one of the most successful writers of the 20th century. Heller has done a good job of exploring that part of Rand's life, filling in many details I had not known about and using independent research into her life in Russia and the fate of her family after Rand lost touch with them.

The only complaints I have about this part of the book are Heller's playing amateur psychologist in many places and ascribing Rand's later views to various events in her early life. Those are pure speculation and don't give much credit to Rand for formulating actual ideas about the world, rather than having her views determined by it in some kind of pseudo-Skinnerian fashion.

The sections on her books are particularly good. Heller shows a strong understanding of the themes, both philosophical and artistic, in play. This is particularly important because without an understanding of Rand's aims to create "Romantic" fiction, the novels can appear very melodramatic and over-written compared to the more current favoured "Naturalistic" style. When more properly compared with writers like Hugo or Dostoevsky, one can see more clearly what Rand was aiming at and judge how well she did, or didn't achieve it.

The later part of the book is less interesting, and less well researched. It focuses on her relationship with Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, and the so-called cult that grew up around Rand after Atlas Shrugged was published. Heller makes it clear up front that she got a lot of input from the Brandens and I don't believe she took that input with enough of a grain of salt, given the Brandens history of misleading and borderline deceptive remarks about this period and their obvious incentives to make themselves look better and Rand look worse. This focus on the Branden's inputs may be partially due to the fact that she did not have access to Rand's surviving papers in the Ayn Rand Archive run by the Ayn Rand Institute. She does not give a reason for that denial, so it is not possible to fully judge, but given the quality of the majority of this book, I think that decision was a mistake on the part of ARI. This book, and the other Rand biography that came out at around the same time, Jennifer Burn's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, will probably serve as the standard Rand biographies for some time to come and would have been better for everyone if they had full access to all sides. I will probably read Burn's book as soon as I can get a library copy and compare and contrast it with Heller's.

One other criticism is that there is a large hole in the book named Frank O'Connor, her husband of 50+ years. All evidence seems to indicate O'Connor was a taciturn individual and hasn't left a lot of evidence of his point of view on Rand, her writings, the Branden affair or their marriage. This book gives some small evidence that there may have been problems in the marriage, and with O'Connor, but most of it comes across as speculation with little foundation. It may not be possible, even with extensive research, to discover more about O'Connor and his point of view but it doesn't look like that was done here.

I just finished Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire.

Rosemary and Rue is an urban fantasy detective novel set in the SF Bay area. The protagonist, October "Toby" Day, is a half-faerie, half-human changeling struggling to find her place when neither side really accepts her.

McGuire, a local author who is also a must see feature on the local SF convention scene due to her off the cuff witty remarks, does a good job with the first book of this planned series. At some points it is a little too obvious she is setting up things to use in other books of a long series (from the numerous possible future/past lovers, to the mentioned but not detailed heroic back story of the protagonist), but she also does a good jobs of the basics of this story.

It starts out with a murder that needs to be solved (with a curse attached to make sure the protagonist doesn't lose focus) and the protagonist is a good example of the kind of detective that solves cases by acting like a bull in a china shop - wandering around bugging people until the solution presents itself.

The down side might be just the setting - urban fantasy started to be written in the late 80's, with Charles De Lint and Emma Bull pioneering the field, but it has grown to such an extent that it almost feels cliched now.

Overall, a good start and worth checking out.

Yesterday I finished Hot Springs by Stephen Hunter.

I wrote about another of his books here. This book actually comes before the other one, and is similar. It is also a "tough guy" story. In this case, it's about the same tough guy, Earl Swagger, working to shut down a gambling town, based somewhat on the real town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, with some real people like Bugsy Siegel, Virginia Hill, Owney Madden and a guest appearance by Mickey Rooney.

This novel is a little more sophisticated than Pale Horse Coming, in that the main character has a lot of emotional problems stemming from an abusive father. These are addressed by the end of the novel, which explains why they are not as central to the sequel.

A few days ago I finished A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester.

The subtitle says it is about the medieval mind and the Renaissance, but those two subjects are, respectively, only briefly discussed or barely mentioned. The book is really three essays.

The first is a very brief and cursory overview of the medieval period. This is so cursory that it seems to over-simplify in many ways and is heavily criticized in online reviews.

The second is a detailed overview of the Protestant Reformation, and is much better than the first. It covers a lot of the major events, including the lead up to Martin's protests and the reasons why they were more successful than previous heresies. Very interesting and well written.

The third is a profile of Ferdinand Magellan, whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe, though he himself died in an ill considered battle in the Philippines.

I just finished Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.

This one is as good as his first book, Elantris, and better than his latest, Warbreaker. It tells a self contained story, but is also the first book in a trilogy.

The things it has in common with the other books are an new type of magic that the world is built around, a deep feeling back story and believable characters. This is definitely a strong suit of this book compared to Warbreaker, where the characters felt much less fully realized.

I can see why this series was his break out work, leading him to be thought of as one of the new authors to watch in fantasy writing. Too bad that it lead him to get the contract to finish the mediocre Wheel of Time series rather than writing more new novels of his own.

A few days ago, I finished Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper.

I've always wanted to read a book by a conspiracy nut, and now I have. Cooper rolls in so many of the standard conspiracy subjects - the Illuminati, UFOs, AIDs, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission - that you might think he is writing a parody like the Illuminatus! Trilogy. That is, until you find out that he was actually killed after shooting a police officer that had come to serve a warrant on him. The guy is actually so nuts that he questions easily verifiable physical facts, like the moon always keeping the same side facing the earth.

The book is really a few short essays, tied together with copies of public documents and a few other pieces of conspiracy lunacy from others, including one that he claims was found on a salvaged copy machine. Of course, Cooper takes this as evidence that it is a genuine government document instead of the product of another mind as warped as his.

Given that he served without incident in the Air Force and the Navy, he must have been sane enough at one point. He describes things he saw from those days, relating to UFOs and other conspiracies, that seem to indicate he might have had problems even back then.

Overall, it was good to have read it, but I wouldn't recommend it. A very difficult read.

I just finished Get Real by Donald E. Westlake, the 14th, and probably last, of his Dortmunder novels.

Get Real is one of the better of the later novels. The setup is simple - Dortmunder and the gang get asked to be involved in a reality TV show about them doing a heist - and their is no nemesis figure like there has been in many of the more recent entries. It's just about them figuring out what to steal from whom, and how to do it.

Very enjoyable.

In reading this, I also looked up the movies that have been made of the various Dortmunder novels. I think Dortmunder must be one of the most filmed modern characters, although the characters name is almost always changed for the film. How many others have been played by a range of actors like Robert Redford, George C. Scott, Paul Le Mat, Christopher Lambert and Martin Lawrence? Sadly, the movies are almost all terrible.

This morning I finished Busted Flush, the latest in the Wild Cards series.

I was a fan of the original series, reading up to the tenth book in the series before losing track of it. This is the 2nd in a intended new trilogy, following up on the first book Inside Straight.

This book has the same flaws as Inside Straight, and makes some of those flaws clearer. For example, their use of more "ripper from the headlines" style settings doesn't work well. In Inside Straight, this was a reality TV show. In Busted Flush, it is a Katrina style flooding of New Orleans. Other flaws include too many characters, with too many switches of perspective, making it difficult to keep track of who's who.

A few days ago, I finished A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin.

I'm a huge, huge fan of another Helprin book, A Winter's Tale. While A Soldier of the Great War doesn't live up to that standard, it is still a good, and enjoyable book.

It starts off in the present day, as a worker misses his bus and an old man gets off in sympathy and they decide to walk to their destinations, even though they are few days walk away. Along the way, the old man reluctantly starts talking about his life and his service during WW1. The story ranges from his early romances/crushes in Rome, to service in the trenches, to desertion and almost execution and then service in the Alps.

The scenes set in pre-war Italy feel like typical fin de siècle portraits of the time, the war is stereotypically horrible and stupid, so there aren't any real surprises here - just a well told story.

Over the weekend, we went and saw Fantastic Mr. Fox, the new Wes Anderson movie based on the Roald Dahl book.

It's a fun movie, but not one I would recommend for most kids. I doubt most kids will be able to follow the story, and might get very lost during the Anderson-esque relationship scenes between Mr. Fox, his son and his wife's nephew. It is definitely the weirdest semi-kids movie I've ever seen, from the first moment we see Mr. Fox listening to The Ballad of Davey Crockett to the final dance scene in the grocery store.

My favourite moment - anytime Fox or his family are eating, when they transform from urbane anthropomorphized animals to a much wilder state. I laughed every time.

The one sour note for me was the use of well known actors for the voices. George Clooney's voice is to recognizable as Mr. Fox and it is a distraction from the movie.

I finished two books over the Thanksgiving break.

The first is Dzur by Steven Brust. I'm a big Brust fan and have read all of his books. Dzur is a good read, but not one of the best of the series. Like most of the later books in the series, it uses an unconventional structure. This one is structured around a meal the main characters has. Each chapter starts with a re-telling of part of the meal and then continues into the main story. It was also the latest book in both chronological and publication order, rare in a series that jumps back and forth in time.

Of course the book will be almost unreadable by anyone who hasn't read the series, even though they tell self-contained stories.

The second book was Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter.

Pale Horse Coming falls into the category of what I call tough guy noir. Pioneered by Mickey Spillane, the books feature characters that are constantly upping the stakes in toughness, until the toughest bastard is the one left alive. Hunter does add some emotional depth and variety to his tough guys, which does make the book more compelling.

The story features an isolated prison farm in rural Mississippi during the 50s, featuring brutal treatment of the inmates and a mysterious secret that ends up explaining some its isolation and brutality. It's a page turner, with some off putting parts. It's set in the 50s and the racial language used is period accurate, which reads as fairly shocking to modern ears. Also, towards the end there is one chapter that is basically gun porn and isn't really necessary to the rest of the story at all.

Yesterday I finished Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy.

I was going to write something about this book, but then I re-read what I wrote about Whitethorn Woods and realized that I felt exactly the same about this book. This one is centered around a heart clinic, and involve return appearances of many characters from some of her other books. The short vignette feel of the interlocking stories isn't my favourite, but it's still an enjoyable read overall.

I just finished Plastic Fantastic by Eugenie Samuel Reich, a well done non-fiction book about the scientific frauds of Jan Hendrik Schön.

Schön had appeared to be a prodigy, one of the most prolific publishers of breakthrough scientific papers in physics in the late 90's/early 2000's. His papers on organic crystals were viewed with suspicion by some, but when he moved on to publish papers on single molecule transistors, his lack of expertise in creating phony data in this field finally got him caught.

It's an interesting story, told from somewhat of a distance since Schön has never totally come clean about what he did.

Yesterday I finished They Fought For the Sky by Quentin Reynolds, continuing my readings about the first world war.

This is one of the definitive books telling the story about the use of airplanes in WW1, including the development of offensive capabilities. It goes beyond the usual stories of the top few aces, like Richthofen, and covers somewhat the men behind some of the planes as well, thought the focus is on Tony Fokker.

Nicely written, and a nice addition to the First World War, which didn't discuss the air war at all.