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.