This morning I finished The Gathering Storm by Kate Elliott, the 5th in the fantasy series The Crown of Stars.

Like the last time I read one of her books, I read most of this one on an airplane. As I wrote back in April, big fantasy books are perfect company for flying - engrossing enough in the moment to distract you from long waits/flights but un-important/un-challenging enough that you can follow the plot without giving them your full attention and throw them away if you need more space/less weight in your luggage.

The Gathering Storm is a good continuation of this series. It does a number of unexpected things - in particular, it wraps up a number of ongoing plot elements built up over the last 4 books even though it is not the last in the series. Now that I've read it, I'm curious to see what happens in the last book.

But first, I have to make some time for Harry Potter!

Amazon Link: The Gathering Storm

While I was back home in Canada, I finished Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton, the sequel to Pandora's Star, which I wrote about here.

Judas Unchained wraps up the story nicely, tying off all the loose ends. As is usual in a lot of books, the resolution is often not as interesting as the build up for a lot of fiction. Creating a mystery and making it seem important while it is still a mystery is a lot easier than coming up with something that is fully satisfying once it's fully revealed.

The only negative thing I have to say about this book is that if I hadn't read Pandora's Star only a few weeks before I read this one, I think it would have been very difficult to keep all the characters/locations/plot points seperate. This book continues right where the last one left off with no attempt made to re-introduce characters or situations or summarize anything that happened in the first book.

Amazon Link: Judas Unchained

Sorry about the lack of updates - I've been away at another bluegrass festival - the Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass Festival in Hollister, CA - and I'm in the middle of another huge, 800+ page book.

I'm off to Edmonton for the rest of the week so I'll probably have some posts when I return next Monday.

Yesterday I finished Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? by Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg - the story of the Carter family in American music.

The Carter family, starting with A.P. Carter, his wife Sara and his sister-in-law (and Sara's cousin) Maybelle and continuing with their children, had a pivotal role in bringing music out of the Appalachian Mountains and exposing it to the rest of America. They either wrote or popularized a huge number of songs that make up the traditional folk and bluegrass repertoire as well as defining the tight harmony sound and guitar backup behind traditional country music.

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? has been widely praised and deservedly so. It's a great read and really provides a feel for the early music industry as well as the particulars of Appalachian culture.


Amazon Link: Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

I just finished The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. I was given this book by a friend of mine when he visited last year but I'm just getting around to it now. It's a translation of a German bestseller and fits in the techno-thriller category.

The basic plot is that a series of odd incidents start to point to a strange fact - that the ocean's creatures seem to be working together to kill of humanity! If you've read any Michael Crichton, this book will be very familiar - descriptive catastrophes, lots of scientific background noise, some mostly wooden characters, evil government agents and humanity over-stepping it's bounds and getting into trouble.

The plot is mostly fun and the early catastrophes are interesting but the book bogs down a little once people figure out what is going on and the inevitable mixed expedition of scientists and military set out to fix it.

Amazon Link: The Swarm

Went to see Ratatouille on Independence Day. Another great movie from Pixar. I think there is a great business story about Pixar that will be written some day. How does a former hardware company become one of the most consistent film studio of the last 15 years? So far they have released seven features and there is not a dog among them - all seven are not only technological marvels, pushing the state of computer animation, but overall great films as well.


I also finished The Mysteries by Lisa Tuttle. It's about a private detective who is fascinated with disappearances. The chapters alternate between the main plot and little mini-stories that detail some of the most famous disappearances in history.

It started off slow with too much back-story but got better as the main characters got more involved in the main story. About half way through it changes from a standard private eye story into more of an urban fantasy but it did it smoothly enough that it didn't lose my interest. Not my favourite book of this year but an OK read.


Amazon Link:
Ratatouille
The Mysteries

Last night I finished Executive Intelligence by Justin Menkes. My girlfriend was looking at business books in the library and I picked up this one.

There are a lot of books on what makes a good executive and this one tries to cut across the grain of all of them by simplifying down to the basics. His hypothesis is that executive performance is mainly driven by a kind of intelligence, a sub-set of general intelligence that is focussed on critical thinking applied to three areas - business tasks, relations to others and self-awareness.

It's an interesting idea but not very completely developed in this book. A lot of the book feels like filler - short chapters with ambitious titles but not much meat on their bones with a lot of anecdotes taken from CEO interviews. It gets better towards the end when Menkes criticizes not only some of the most popular other theories like "emotional intelligence" and "charismatic leaders" but manages to side swipe most other current theories as focusing on side issues and things that only have indirect effects on management quality.

One other nice feature is that his main points, and particularly his criticisms, are backed up by actual research rather than just anecdotes and supposition. I don't do much hiring of CEOs but there are a number of things I can take from this book and apply to my own job where I do help interview prospective new hires.

If you're interested in this topic, you can get the gist of this book in an hour or two, mainly by looking at one detailed chart, skimming the first half of the book and reading the last few chapters in more depth.

Amazon Link: Executive Intelligence

Last night I finished Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton.

Hamilton writes long books best described as space opera. His main success has been with the Night's Dawn Trilogy, a sprawling work involving the dead returning to life by possessing the living - an unusual theme in SF.

Pandora's Star is similarly sprawling, involving multiple characters on multiple worlds but stays to more familiar SF ingredients - wormholes, "hive" consciousness aliens, hidden conspiracies and, eventually, interstellar war.

It's a good book and the story/characters were engaging enough that I'm looking for the sequel right now but the large cast did start to blend together by the end. Hamilton likes to take his time developing his plot's and this book is no exception, most of the first half of the novel would probably be brief background in another author's hands.

Amazon Link: Pandora's Star

I finished The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont this morning.

This is a pastiche of the pulp style that flourished in the 1920s/1930s with a twist - a lot of the characters are famous pulp authors. Some of the authors who appear are Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant, author of The Shadow stories), Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson, author of the Doc Savage stories), L. Ron Hubbard and H.P. Lovecraft.

Part of the book involves the publishing industry in New York but eventually branches off into a mystery in Chinatown involving opium, nerve gas and mysterious refugee from the Japanese invasion of China.

I've read some of the original pulps and though this book is a tribute to them in some ways, it is better written than most of them. I quite enjoyed it.

Amazon Link: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril

I just finished The Canon by Natalie Angier. The Canon is a summation of current basic scientific knowledge, wrapped in a well written package. I originally picked this up for my girlfriend - she has complained for years about the poor job her high school science teachers did and how she would like to know more about basic science.

If you're interested in a particular topic, I'd look for more focused books but if you want an over-view, this is one of the best I've seen. I found the biology section particularly interesting since I took only the most basic biology classes in school and didn't pay attention very much in those. This book fleshed out what I know a little.

Amazon Link: The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

During my trip I was busy enough that I didn't get a lot of reading done but I did finish one book after I got home - The Ionian Mission by Patrick O'Brien. This is the eight in the Aubrey-Maturin series which I wrote about here. This one finds them taking part in a blockade in the Mediterranean as well as running a few side missions. Typical enjoyable entry in this series.

Amazon Link: The Ionian Mission

There won't be any posts here this week. I'm off to volunteer at the California Bluegrass Association's Music Camp and to attend their Father's Day Bluegrass Festival afterwards.

This morning I finished Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett. This is one of the Discworld series of books.

Back in the late 70's/early 80's, humorous fantasy novels started to get popular. Some of the main authors in this sub-genre were Robert Lynn Asprin with the MythAdventures series and Terry Pratchett with the Discworld series. Since I was reading a lot of fantasy back then, I read a lot of these books as well. I'm not sure if it was my general dis-enchantment with fantasy or actual quality issues but it seemed that the quality of these series started to fall off rapidly as new titles came out. I quit reading them both around the fifth or sixth books in the series.

I was surprised a few years ago to realize that Pratchett was still around and had continued the series pretty much without pause. He had grown into one of the best selling fantasy authors. Even more surprising was that somewhere in the time between when I stopped reading them and when I started again, the quality had gone way up. I've been reading the new ones and going back and reading some of the old ones when I run into them at the library and I think the newer ones are even better than the first ones in the series. One of the reasons for this is that Pratchett uses multiple main characters and locations so he can switch things up when he has run out of ideas for one particular group.

If you're already a fan of this series, Carpe Jugulum is a little more serious than most and is quite good. TIt is centered around Lancre and the 3 witches - Agnes, Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax.

If you're interested in starting the series, I recommend reading the first few to get your feet wet and then picking them up as you find them. They are mostly independent stories, not heavily dependent on what happened in the previous books.



Amazon Link: Carpe Jugulum

I just finished Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track, a collection of letters written by Noble prize winner Richard Feynman and edited by his daughter, Michelle Feynman.

Feynman is one of the greatest, and one of the best known, scientists of the 20th century. I've been interested in him for many years, starting when I read his collection of anecdotes Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and the follow-on, What Do You Care What Other People Think? If you are interested in reading his letters, I recommend reading the above two collections or one of his biographies first. The letter collection doesn't stand well on its own but it does provide some additional insight into his views.

Amazon Link: Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman

I just finished Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the sequel to The Burning City.

Larry Niven was one of my favourite authors growing up and even though the quality of his work has dropped somewhat, I still try to read everything he puts out. This book was almost an exception because I did not like the previous book, The Burning City, very much. I found it a difficult book to get into and not clearly written at all.

Burning Tower is a much better book. It's clearly written, has some nice characters and a engaging plot, even if it is a little derivative.

Both books are set in a mythical pre-history California in a world Niven also wrote about in The Magic Goes Away. The basic premise of that world is that magic depends on a non-renewable resource. Burning City and Burning Tower take place in a time when that resource has started to run out and the characters have to deal with a world where magic is present but in variable amounts and can be very un-reliable.


Amazon Link: Burning Tower

I just finished Better by Atul Gawande.

Better is subtitled "A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" and a good portion of the book is devoted to exploring how we can do well at whatever we pursue, using Gawande's medical reporting as examples. Readers should note that contrary to the book's introduction, this is not really the whole book. For example, the sections on how a doctor's pay is determined and medical professionals who assist with executions are pretty off topic. Other sections, like the one on obstetrics, appear to be off topic but boomerang back nicely by the end.

All of the sections, on and off topic, are well written and interesting. I was a little disappointed since I was hoping for a more well integrated book rather than a collection of previously published articles (mostly from the New Yorker) but it provides a lot to think about and to try to apply to your own life, whether it's work or hobbies that you want to do better at.

I wrote about his previous book a while ago.

Amazon Link: Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

I spent a good portion of the weekend at Baycon, the local Bay Area science fiction convention.

Even though I read a lot of science fiction, I've never been involved with science fiction fans as a group. I've been to one or two cons, including a Worldcon held in San Jose in 2002. It seems most fans attend to socialize but I mainly like to go to attend some of the panels.

At this Baycon, the most interesting panel I attended was one on podcasting novels. One of the panelists was Scott Sigler, one of the first, and most successful, authors to use podcasting to promote his un-published novels. He had some success with his first novel and his 2nd novel debutted at 7th place on Amazon after his podcasting promotions led to a publishing deal.

According to Sigler and the other authors on the panel, promoting novels using podcasting is still pretty new and not a saturated field like blogs. If I was a struggling author, I would definitely want to give this a try.

This weekend I finished Seeker by Jack McDevitt.

This is a pretty typical McDevitt book - a few intrepid investigators try to find a lost civilization or clues to some odd event that happened in the distant past. The one difference is that the research in this case is on a more human level, involving talking to witnesses, tracking down lost objects, etc. instead of the galactic scale of most of his books.

It's an OK book but not one of his best.

Amazon Link: Seeker

Last night we saw another concert, Tim O'Brien at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley. O'Brien is one of the cross-over stars of bluegrass. Most of his fans come from either his days with Hot Rize or his work as a solo artist/songwriter.

This was a solo show so it was just him and his guitar (or mandolin or fiddle) for most of it. Normally I wouldn't buy tickets for a solo show but I got these from a friend who couldn't go at the last minute. Even thought it's not my favourite format, O'Brien does a good solo show. He is a skilled enough player on all the instruments to keep things interesting and he has a laid back stage presence that goes along well with the songs. At the end he was joined by the opening act, the Infamous Stringdusters. a young band from Nashville.

The Stringdusters are one of two bands I've seen doing a "post-modern" form of bluegrass that abandons a lot of the traditional roles for each instrument and instead creates a layered, tone-colour sound based on instrumental virtuosity. The other band that is trying something similar is Chris Thile's new band, recently renamed the Tensions Mountain Boys. Thile's band is strong enough that it overcame the problems I have with this new sound but the Stringdusters aren't. The layered sound they seem to be going for detracts from (and sometimes totally undermines) the driving rhythm that is a fundamental part of bluegrass for me. The songs they did at the end with O'Brien were the best of the night. O'Brien's more traditional approach and song choice added a nice rhythmic feel to the band.

Last night I finished Iron Council by China
Mieville. The book jumps back and forth between the building of a revolution in the city of New Crozubon and a group of refugees from the city that are searching for a legendary group , the Iron Council, that rebelled and fled the city man years ago.

In terms of genre, like the other two books in the series (Perdido Street Station, The Scar), Iron Council is fantasy rather than science fiction but it's not what most people think of as fantasy. There are no Tolkien-esque characters or settings, it is more like what is sometimes called steampunk or modern writers like Neil Gaiman.

This is the third of his books set in the same world and I would put it in the middle in terms of quality. I liked Perdido Street Station the best and The Scar the least. The twists and turns of the brewing revolution are interesting but the characters in this one are less compelling and since it the plot takes place in multiple locations, it never creates a strong sense of place to latch on to.

Amazon Link: Iron Council