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.

Last night I finished The First World War by John Keegan, an excellent detailed overview of the war by one of preeminent military historians.

I've always been roughly familiar with the events of World War I - the horrors of trench warfare, the early use of airplanes, tanks and poison gas, etc. - but this Remembrance Day, I realized that I'd never read a detailed version of what happened. Given how seminal WW1 is to the shape of the 20th century since it broke the economies of Europe, helped enable the communist revolution in Russia, set the stage for, and almost made inevitable, WW2 and changed European culture forever, I thought I should remedy that gap in my education.

This book is an excellent place to start, going from the buildup to the war in early 1914 to the armistice in 1918. Keegan has his own theories about what lead to war, mainly the necessity of triggering pre-planned war strategies in case of crisis to avoid giving a crippling advantage to the other side if they mobilize first. He also makes clear why the war bogged down into static trench warfare instead of the more open style found in WW2, primarily found in lack of reliable communication and flexible (i.e. non-rail) mechanized transport.

It was also very illuminating to read about WW1 in light of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the public's attitude towards them. The current allied death totals in Iraq and Afghanistan are less than the toll of one day of some of the larger WW1 battles, like the Somme, Ypres or Verdun, yet attitudes in those countries that have troops there have turned against those efforts. During WW1, the populaces didn't turn against the war even given year after year of casualties in the hundreds of thousands.

We just got back from seeing Michael Jackson This is It.

I like seeing behind the scenes footage, so I was OK with going to see it, but I ended up liking it a lot more than I expected. I grew up surrounded by Michael Jackson songs, but it wasn't kind of music I liked then. Time has been kind to a lot of his best songs, and now I can appreciate how good they really are, particularly when played live by a good band.

On top of that, you have Michael's dancing, which is still phenomenal. He showed few signs of his age or his condition in this footage and the movie is very enjoyable, just as a performance. I left the theater actually considering buying a greatest hits package of some kind, and feeling it was a shame he didn't live to do at least a few of these live shows.

This morning I finished Warbreaker by Branden Sanderson.

This is the second book I've read by Sanderson, and while this book is not as good as his first, Elantris, it still feels very fresh in the somewhat stale fantasy field.

Not set in the same world, at least as far as I can tell, Warbreaker has to do with a brewing war between two countries, one weak and one strong. The strong one is so mainly due to magic derived from Breathe, something all individuals possess and that can be exchanged and hoarded and used to animate the inanimate, under certain conditions. The weaker power rejects the use of this magic, on religious grounds.

At the start of the novel, one of the royal daughters from the weaker countries is being married off to the stronger one. Once she gets there, along with a sister that follows her surreptitiously, the intrigues that might lead to war are explored.

It's a good book. The ideas are fresher than most fantasy, but the characters are not as strong as his first book. They sound, and act, like very modern Americans rather than people from a different world and this breaks down the suspension of disbelief somewhat.

I finished two books in the last few days - The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King.

The Green Glass Sea is a YA book about two girls growing up in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Both are social misfits and end up being friends. It's an enjoyable book, with some very sad moments as one of the girl experiences terrible losses. The characters are less generic than a lot of YA characters, although the kid without parents present is almost a cliche.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about a baseball loving nine year old who wanders away from her family and gets lost in the woods. It shows that King hasn't lost his ability to write compelling narratives, even if his ability to accurately portray a nine year old girl is very weak. His characters that are teens or adults feel much more real than this girl - I had to constantly remind myself that she was supposed to be nine.

Last night I got to see Devo at the Regency Ballroom in SF.

On this tour, they are doing two nights in each city. Night one, they play the entire album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo! Night two, they play Freedom of Choice.

We decided to just go see the second night. It was a fun show, after a weird opening act. Though it was short, since they only did one album plus two encore songs, it was very satisfying. The high points for me were Gates of Steel and the closing Beautiful Life (with Booji Boy!).

I hadn't been to this venue before and it was quite nice. From their website, they tend to get rock/metal acts, so the security presence was a little heavy for the older/calmer Devo crowd.

Also, the only tickets available were "Meet and greet" tickets, so I got to hang around afterwords and speak to the band briefly and got pictures with the Casale brothers, as well as signatures on an old band picture and a poster. They are supposed to be working on a new album, and hopefully they will tour for that as well.

The latest book I have finished is Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin.

The title Digital Barbarism could cover a lot of ground, but the subtitle is "A Writer's Manifesto" and the book mainly deals with the issue of copyright, in particular the efforts of some to reduce or eliminate it in our era of digital storage.

The title gives away the fact that Helprin is against this. The book was germinated out of an op-ed piece he did promoting copyright extension, and the resulting criticism by bloggers, etc.

The book is alternately infuriating and convincing. His overall argument wins out - that copyright is a valid and valuable piece of individual rights and needs to be defended, not extinguished - but along the way there are too many ad hominem attacks, pointless pieces of memoir and misplaced anti-modernist diatribes. He also complains about being mis-represented, while mis-representing his opponents. All of this gives the book a scatter shot, disorganized and poorly thought out feeling that undermines the cogent arguments he does make.

This morning I finished The Road to Vengeance by Judson Roberts, the third book in his Strongbow series of YA historical fiction.

Everything I said about the first two books still holds - here and here. Strong story, well drawn battle scenes, well researched history and weirdly inappropriate cover pictures.

The third book picks up from the abrupt ending of the second book, and continues the story as the protagonist is campaigning with a Viking army in France. This book wraps up that campaign, and also puts the focus back on his quest for revenge towards the end. The end is much more satisfying - open ended and obviously continuing the saga, but wrapping up enough of the story to feel like a complete book instead of part of a larger piece.

Yesterday, I finished The Laws of Our Fathers by Scott Turow.

Another excellent book by Turow. While others are writing generic legal thrillers, Turow is using the legal thriller medium to write literature. While there is a killing, and a trial, at the core of this book, it is used as a way to explore many other topics including aging, the holdovers from the 60s, the relationships between children and parents and the races.

The book is told primarily from two perspectives, one is the judge on the case of a killing where some people she knew in the 60s are involved, and is set in the present. The other is one of those people, her ex-boyfriend, who also knows the people in the case although not involved himself, and is set in the 60s. The people they know are hard core revolutionaries and may have been involved in a campus bombing in "Damon", a fictional town obviously based on Berkeley.

As I said above, another excellent book showing why Turow is head and shoulders above other writers in the genre.

Last night I finished Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell.

I've been interested in the battle of Agincourt since I was a kid, an interest that was heightened when I found out that an ancestor of mine, John De Byllam, was one of the English archers who fought there, and was knighted afterwords.

Agincourt is a piece of historical fiction, following an English archer who survived the slaughter at Soissons, and ended up on the fields of Agincourt. The battle itself only takes up a small part at the end of the book, the main part is build up, developing characters who's fate would be decided at Agincourt.

Overall, an enjoyable book. Cornwell's characters don't feel like true period people, like you would get in the Patrick O'Brien books, but they don't feel so modern as to totally undermine the historical part of the fiction. The history is reasonably accurate, adding only a few non-historical characters.

I just finished Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind, the sixth book in his Sword of Truth series.

I've commented in other reviews how Goodkind creates these ridiculous situations for his characters, but I finally realized why--it's the Superman dilemma. His main character, Richard Cypher/Rahl, along with his companions is so powerful and hyper-competent that he will defeat any opponent that comes against him openly, and has done so over and over in these books. The result is that it is very difficult for the author to put him in real jeopardy, and therefore the ridiculous situations, similar to what used to happen in Superman comics. This book actually makes that situation worse as it is revealed by the end that in addition to being a superb warrior, the most powerful wizard in many years (and a new type of wizard), he is also a great businessman, an insightful philosopher and a great artist.

This book also has two other problems. First, it's way too long. The second is that Goodkind has obviously become enamored with the ideas of Ayn Rand and is using them in the most transparent and cliched ways possible. For those readers out there who think Ayn Rand is a hack writer, pick up this book and see how badly those ideas could be portrayed.

Today I finished Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane.

Lehane has a reputation for being more than just a standard genre writer, so I was a little surprised by Gone, Baby, Gone because it is just that - a standard genre novel. All the cliches of the modern private eye novel are there - the hard PI (in this case a man/woman team), their even harder but loyal to them criminal friend, the world weary cops they deal with, etc, etc.

The characterizations are a little deeper than your standard run of the mill PI book, but nothing too special when compared to other top of the line practitioners like Estleman or Parker and definitely not notable compared to genre innovators like Hammett or Ellroy.

I also had problems with the portrayal of child kidnapping. It does point out in the intro that the vast majority of child disappearances usually involve family members and are resolved quickly with no problems for the child, the child disappearances in the novel are portrayed so vividly and have horrible outcomes, at least in one case, that that is the impression it will make and increase our societies silly paranoia about it's children.

Still a good novel but, as always, expectations can lead to disappointment.

I just finished Cryptic by Jack McDevitt, a collection of his short fiction.

I'm a fan of McDevitt's novels, but a lot of the short stories in this collection didn't wow me. Most of them were just OK. Of the 30+ stories, there were probably five that I really liked.

Reading a bunch of different pieces by one author in a row does give you a good sense of their writing. Reading through this collection gives a strong picture of the sense of melancholy that runs through a lot of McDevitt's work.

Just saw The Invention of Lying, the new Ricky Gervais movie. It has some funny moments but it wasn't as good as I hoped.

They handle the premise in a weird way. Instead of just not being able to lie, the people in the movie must tell the whole and literal truth all the time, i.e. they can't stay silent and they can't be mistaken. It also postulates that everyone in the real world is very negative and mean, but just keeps quiet about it. This changes the whole tenor of the movie, and makes all the characters come off as more mean than truthful. And after Ricky starts to lie, it makes them all appear stupid.

The beginning of the movie, mainly scene after scene of people criticizing Ricky, are a real downer. It picks up somewhat as Ricky learns to lie, but never fully recovers. And the main plot centers around his pursuit of Jennifer Garner while never making it clear why he is interested in her, other than her looks. He's portrayed as deeper then that, but she never offers anything and comes off as shallow throughout.

I just finished The City & The City by China Mieville.

(Spoiler alert)

Mieville's latest novel is, at heart, a hardboiled detective/police procedural style mystery. The setting is what sets it apart, at puts it with one foot in the SF field. The protagonist works in a strange city in the Balkans that has become mentally bifurcated. Some people live in Beszel and some live in Ul Qoma, though they are physically co-located. Both sets of citizens are trained from birth to ignore the other city and its populace unless they cross between them through a border crossing. Inadvertent, and intentional, illegal crossings are investigated by a feared and mysterious group known as Breach. When a foreign student is killed in one city and dumped in the other, the resulting investigation threatens to undermine the whole setup.

The weird setup gives it the feel of a SF novel, without actually involving any fantasy or SF elements. And overall, the mystery elements work. There are the standard sinister businessmen, threatening thugs and people who want to shut down the investigation, but they all feel fresh enough in the telling to work. The climax of the novel is a little of a let down, but this kind of mystery is more about the process then it is about the solution. The most similar mysteries are probably Martin Cruz Smith's Renko novels.

Overall it's nice to read a Mieville novel that is not set in the same world as most of his fantasy novels. This one is not as disturbing to read as some of his others, more like a middle ground between the feel of Perdido Street Station and his YA novel Un Lun Dun.

I just finished The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.

The Age of Wonder covers what Holmes calls the second scientific revolution in Britain. Specifically he covers the careers of Joseph Banks, William Herschel, Humphrey Davies as well as the craze for ballooning and the early careers of Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage and John Herschel.

One of the main points of the book seems to be to put this new crop of scientists (a term that was only created towards the end of this period) in context and show how art and science were more closely aligned. Most of the scientists above wrote poetry of one form or another and were friends with some of the great Romantic poets like Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge, who also wrote poetry that used scientific themes and inspiration.

The topic is an interesting one, but the books main strength is the writing. The author has a strong, clear style that brings out the various personalities and keeps the narrative interesting and informative without getting bogged down in details.

I just finished The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton, the second book in his Void Trilogy.

Not surprising here - it's not really a separate story as much as a direct continuation of the first book, which I wrote about here. So much so, that it was hard to start this book since it's been a while since I read the first one. Keeping track of the list of characters and their complex interactions wasn't easy even while reading that book - trying to do it jumping into this one was worse.

Also, like the first book, the story within a story, told as series of shared dreams, is more compelling than the main story. It takes some unexpected twists here, turning it's protagonist into even more of an uber-mensch, but still makes for a good fantasy story, although it is now tied into the main story in such a way that it wouldn't make sense on it's own.