Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Category: Books

  • What Are We Reading – February 2019

    This has been a month of transitions for the secret cabal of Glibertarians who run the site. Location changes, states of being changes (J.W. has finally had her top surgery and would like to be known as Jedwina going forward), so most of us haven’t done much more reading than rental, tax, medical consent or estate paperwork lately. So if you’ve read something, please fill the howling void left behind and let’s give Jedwina some great suggestions to pick for next month.

    jesse.in.mb

    Not a whole hell of a lot to be honest. I keep chipping away at “Roadside Picnic,” which makes video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro 2033 make more sense, but I always have a hard time with the cadence of Russian genre fiction (translated to English) that I can’t quite put my finger on. I burned through a bunch of the Nightwatch series by Sergei Vasilievich Lukyanenko a few years back, and while I enjoyed them immensely as fluff sci-fi/fantasy, something about the storytelling tripped me up while reading them. I’ve also been picking away at Aristotle’s Rhetoric which is equal parts interesting and dry. Some of the allusions to classical figures allude me for I am not well educated, but it’s been very neat to read up on the art and science of making good arguments.

    Brett L

    I re-read most of Nathan Lowell’s Trader’s Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper they’re not super complex books, but kind of easy to get into. Its basically Merchant Marines in Space. Some might find them incredibly boring, but I really like them. I also read Smoke and Summons, kind of a weird, steampunk meets magic book about a woman who is somehow bound to and can be forced to channel a demon. She escapes from her evil magician owner and falls in with a thief who just happens to be the son of the head of the church. It was an interesting read, but obviously part of a much larger work. Written by the woman who wrote the Paper Magician, which, come to think of it is how I would describe that book. Oh, and I re-read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I wish he’d spent a third less time describing TEOTWAKI and a third more time describing the post-human future. Oh, and a metric fuckton of Microsoft Azure documentation.

     

    Old Man With Candy

    As you can imagine, my normally limited reading-for-pleasure time has been more limited than normal. But being sent back to the frigid prairies last week, I had books with me on the airplane, chosen less because of an urge to read them, but what’s tolerable among the few that have been unpacked. It had been decades since I had read the Foundation trilogy and my memories were not as fond as the books’ reputation. I spied Second Foundation among the small pile of available books and grabbed it. It’s readable but… that’s about it. It suffered from every fault I remembered: too stuffed with stilted and unlikely dialog, cardboard characters, predictable plot twists. Meh.

    No excuses needed for Frederik Pohl’s The Siege of Eternity, a sequel to The Other End of Time. I think Pohl was incapable of writing a bad book. This isn’t great Pohl, but it is in every way a better book than Second Foundation. And as a libertarian, I enjoy imagining a future where rebellion against government has broken out everywhere, in this case at the instigation of theologically-driven aliens as part of their attempt at conquest.

     

    SugarFree

    Backed up to read Charles Stross’ The Delirium Brief before finally reading the newest Laundry Files novel, The Labyrinth Index. Still an enjoyable read, but I think Stross is getting bored with writing the series. Another installment without Bob, this time focusing on his psychobitch ex-girlfriend Mahri and her attempt to deal with the United States version of The Laundry, variously referred to as The Black Chamber or the Nazgûl. Anything more would be spoilers.

    It read a wide smattering of short stories about cannibalism and then Shane Stadler’s nasty little foray into torture porn, Exoskeleton. If you’ve been longing for a mash-up of Martyrs, Carrie, and The Boys from Brazil, this is the answer to your prayers…

     

    Mad Scientist

    Jason Fagone’s Ingenious is a story about several of the colorful characters competing in the automotive X-prize: 100 MPG (or equivalent, for battery power) in a car that could be mass produced. The author knows almost nothing about cars or engineering, so this is mostly a tale of the teams building the things, and which of their teammates they don’t get along with, who they love, and blah blah blah. The book isn’t long on environmental doom and gloom, but it’s definitely in there. Some of the teams surprise you with a decent finish in the competition despite their duct tape and bubble gum build. Others, attempting to use a Harley-Davidson engine to spin a generator, drop out early with completely unsurprising problems: too loud, too much vibration, and too unreliable. But made in America, so, you know, fuck yeah. Overall the book is an engaging read, but you won’t learn anything about vehicle engineering.

  • What Are We Reading

    OMWC

    Hardly anything because, well, new job and moving. But my bathroom book for the past week has been Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes, a short tome on the Standard Model of cosmology. Come prepared for some real mental challenge.

    While I was flying back and forth to Arizona, I indulged in a fantastically depressing and wonderful collection of stories, novellas, and a couple of complete novels by my favorite (((author))), A Malamud Reader. Although Malamud is usually lumped with contemporaries like Philip Roth, he really was a far better writer.

    One day, I’ll have time to read again.

    SugarFree

    I have retreated to childhood, reading Piers Anthony’s Split Infinity series for the dozenth or so time. I’m going to be honest: he’s not a great writer, but damn can he churn out enjoyable fiction, and the kind that gets creepier to read the older you get, which is an aspect I like. I started with the Xanth series when I was nine or ten, picking up A Spell For Chameleon–mostly off the Darrell K. Sweet cover, familiar from Ballentine’s paperback series of Heinlein Juveniles–at a bookstore going out of business sale. (My dad’s way of dealing with me over my parent’s divorce was to give me money and turn me loose in a bookstore.) I wandered away from Anthony in high school, around the time I realized was reading books about the panties of little girls in the Xanth books, and the rampant sister-fucking of the Bio of A Space Tyrant series got a little weird, and the Incarnations of Immortality ran out of steam. And, I’ll be honest, I was done with fantasy after, um, certain works were read (Seriously, fuck The Elfstones of Shannara,) and it took years for me to bother reading high or epic fantasy again.

    Riven

    Well, I’ve definitely slowed down some on the Dresden Files, but that shouldn’t be a reflection on the books/stories themselves. It’s my fault for not making time for the important things. I finished White Night, moved on to Small Favor, and then rapidly consumed four short stories set between Small Favor and Turn Coat: Day Off, Backup, The Warrior, and Last Call. I’ve been on the first page of the last short story between Small Favor and Turn Coat for a couple weeks now, but I’m confident that one day, eventually, maybe I’ll finish reading Curses.  … Probably. No promises.

    mexican sharpshooter

    Once again, the only thing of note that I read is a children’s book for my 4 year old.  Today’s entry is Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss.  Yertle of course, really is a turtle.  It is a story I particularly like, because Dr, Seuss explains to children how to deal with assholes, particularly the ones that declare themselves king.

    The story begins when Yertle realizes if he stands upon the shell of another turtle, he can see farther than he could if he stood on his own feet.  Why stand on another turtle’s back?  FYTW.  Yertle eventually declares himself king of all that he sees and continues to enslave more turtles in his quest to obtain more power.  Surprisingly, they all seem to agree to his terms.  Stand upon each other’s shoulders, and let Yertle stand atop them all.

    Except for one.  A turtle named Mack, protested and explained multiple times how much it sucked being at the bottom of the pile.  Yertle responded he was the king, so FYTW.

    Until Mack sneezed.  The entire stack of turtles came tumbling down with Yertle on top falling the farthest distance to Earth.  Yertle spent the rest of his days being king of the mud.  Honestly, this is probably the perfect allegory to explain 2016 to a child.

    jesse.in.mb

    Back in September 2017, I read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing due to interesting roommate-related circumstances and the pending possibility of moving. My roommate successfully got a job outside of the country and so I figured I’d revisit themes of throwing away all of my shit as I make room for my boyfriend to move in. In that vein I finally picked up The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up: A Magical Story. It’s probably a great way to introduce kids to the idea of keeping things tidy and letting go of stuff they don’t want/need. I didn’t really get anything new out of it, but my boyfriend realized most of his instrument collection no longer “sparked joy” and is only bringing his uilleann pipes. 

    The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan was a fun procedural drama set in Galway and its environs that tied together a few disparate stories in pleasing ways. It was an audiobook and the narrator (Aoife McMahon) did a superlative job jumping between different characters in a way that gave them dimension without getting in the way of the story.

    SP

    Inventories of household goods. Bills of lading. Real estate listings and leases. Insurance documents. Utility terms of service. Receipts. Checking account and credit card statements. Truck rental contracts. Google Maps. Hotel booking sites.

     

    Brett L

    It was a slow month for me. I read the latest of John Conroe’s Demon Accords novel. I can’t really understand why I keep reading them at this point, except that they’re fast, and they don’t take themselves too seriously. Oh, and he’s good a blowing up his fake worlds real good. This one was kind of… not mailed in, exactly, but he needed to move some players from A to B to write the book he really wants to write. Contrived is a better word. Still fun, although he did kind of Harry Dresden genocide most of an alien race. What else? Oh, I did a re-read of Stross’s Iron Sunrise. I’m still sad he couldn’t really salvage that universe, but totally see his point about it being irretrievably broken. And lots and lots of MS Azure documentation.