December 17, 2023

Mostly Fiction: Reading 12.17.2023

 

The Invisibles Omnibus – Grant Morrison

The first thing I have to mention is the sheer physical heft of the book. It’s hard to read in a normal way. It makes it hard to find the time to sit down and read it because the only way I was able to read it with some momentum and not want to put it down every few minutes was propped up on a desk that I cleared of other stuff.

 

Content-wise, it was interesting. Morrison is a good writer, and the individual stories are connected to some larger arcs and there is payoff at the end, but it does feel like it takes a while for it to get there. He weaves in stuff from the situationists and mentioned memes way earlier than I had heard of them. Also, huge props to the series for including a trans character in the nineties.

 

The other thing that was weird reading the story now is that the Myan great cycle that hit the news at the end of 2012 is a plot point that is important but for a reader now it was just a quaint thing in the past (or did everything actually reset?).

 

Worth reading but I would recommend finding smaller versions because of the dang size of the omnibus book.

 

The Portable Door – Holt

 

At this point I have read a dozen books by Tom Holt. And I like Tom Holt but I’m not an evangelist for him. I heard of him at some point where I was asking for writers like Pratchett and his name came up and it was good that he’d been fairly prolific so there are a number of books one can read by him. But there’s something missing. Like all the ingredients are there but like maybe it’s too British or something. I like it for the absurdist comic fantasy that it is, and I will read more of the books, but maybe it was a detriment that his work was compared to Pratchett because it is hard to stand in that comparison. I’m still going to read the next one in this series, and well keep going from there.

 

The Red and the Black – Stendhal

If there’s one thing that I learned from this book, is that if you have women in your house, don’t invite Julien Sorel in. I had a challenging time getting into this book, as the first parts where Julian is in the provinces and then in seminary go a bit slow, but then once he’s in Paris, it picks up.

 

I didn’t see his crime coming, but it does seem to be in character because Stendhal makes this guy pretty loathsome to me. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to the other characters in the book. I think it may be a dramatic irony built in, but I am far enough removed from living in the context of the book to not really know if I should be rooting for Sorel or not, or if Stendhal likes his creation or not (or if that even matters).

 

I’m glad I read it because it is an important part of the canon but also enjoyable on its own, no matter what you make of the central character.

 

Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

Carter here creates a meditation on truth and storytelling, as she tells the story of Sophie Fevvers and the journalist who is telling her story, Jack Walser.

We meet the characters in London and follow them across Europe to Petersburg and then to Siberia. Sophie is part human and part swan, or is she? Jack follows and falls in love with her, and they end up in a train accident in Siberia and meeting an exiled piano teacher. It’s weird and really peaks after the first third of the book where the characters have met in London and Sophie is telling her back story. But it is also beautifully written so even though it felt like it was spinning out and I was waiting for some resolution it was worth reading.

 

Think Python – Downey

 

I used this book as a supplement to a class I was taking in Python. It was good as a supplement, but I do worry that it would not be sufficient for someone who was only using this book or someone who had not had a bit of a background in doing some programming stuff. The exercises are also made for someone who has a decent understanding of math and personally I stopped trying the exercises after the first few chapters because of that, as well as having other problems that had been assigned to me for the course I was taking.

 

Camp Damascus – Chuck Tingle

 

I had only known Tingle as the author of the seemingly silly titled erotica but having followed him on social media for a while, I know the person behind the façade is an interesting and thoughtful writer. So, I was interested to see that he was making a more mainstream book.

 

Camp Damascus is a horror novel with a queer female teen protagonist who seems to have some sort of autism spectrum disorder. She is in a family in a town that is strongly centered on the titular camp that is run as a conversion camp. It is not giving too much away to say that hijinks ensue. The characters, especially the main one, are beautifully written and developed and the action flows really well. If you were raised around or within the evangelical movement, you might find that Tingle hits some notes perfectly. It feels almost like a backhanded compliment to say that the book is really professionally written and to note that I have already pre-ordered the next “serious” title, but you really should read this book if you like religious themed teen horror. It’s really well done and not even something that is in my normal wheelhouse.

 

Giants in the Earth – Rolvaag

 

My wife’s family is from the northern plains – Scandinavian immigrants to the Dakotas and Nebraska territories, and the story of their ancestor’s descendants is broadly the story told here. Rolvaag tells the story of a group of settlers and the dangers and trials they face trying to tame the empty wilderness and make it their own. If you have ever driven through the plains, you know the barrenness and emptiness of the landscape, but also, its wide-open beauty as the land is just an open ocean all around you.

 

Our heroes face locusts and snowstorms and wandering cows, as well as the natives (though I was surprised how little the people that the settlers were displacing on the land came into the narrative) to make the land their own.

 

The book made me think of how important the relationships you build were in the settlement process. You only had your family and your immediate community, and often you were on your own. The book it reminded me of most was Steinbeck’s East of Eden, not just because of the settlement aspect of it, but also there is the same sort of edge of misogyny in the female characters. The main character’s is Per Hansa and his wife is drawn almost as if she has clinical depression from the move to the prairie and Per Hansa doesn’t address her needs – ignoring them to his detriment.

 

There’s also what felt like a weird lack of tragedy in the book for a set of characters who are facing hardship – right up until the last chapter (spoiler alert). It’s well-written and made me feel like I was part of the settlers. I would call it an engrossing read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 28, 2023

Graphic Novels and Protests: Recent Reads 10.28.2023

 The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott

 

I came to this based off of Thorogood’s newer text. It’s a more straightforward narrative than that one. It’s good though. It’s about friendship and mort importantly, the urgent need to create art. She’s certainly an artist to watch as her career grows. 

 

Monica

This was an interesting book because in structure, it’s a lot like the kind of graphic memoir that you can come across easily. But there is also this supernatural thread that Clowes weaves throughout the narrative. It’s beautifully weird, and then there’s this incredible payoff on the last page. Totally worth your time and attention.

 

If We Burn

“Bevins has a new book coming out,” I said to myself, “I’m pre-ordering that no matter what it’s about.” That’s how good the Jakarta Method was.

 

With “If We Burn,” Bevins moves into more recent history as he explores the protests that swept the world in the 2010s, some of which he was a part of, and interviewing other people who were firsthand witnesses. What struck me most was how he described so many of them taking their cues from recent past and contemporary movements. Protests in the social media age developed a whole vocabulary of action and reaction from both the protesters and authorities.

 

Also, of note is how he covers the emergence of leaderless protests. They can express real dissatisfaction, but they can also have no real (or shifting) demands or possible end states. They can also be co-opted as Bevins shows how some of the protests in Brazil and Egypt evolved.

 

Overall, as someone who wants to see the world develop towards a society of greater equity and citizen rights, the mood is somber. The protests covered here were ineffective for the most part in creating any change that was durable. Perhaps we need a new vocabulary or need to revisit old paradigms.

 

 

July 30, 2023

Recent Reads 7.30.2023

 On the Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures

 

I got this because I have vague positive memories of the movie, especially the gritty steam punk art deco vibe they had going on. I barely remember the plot except for the rocket pack and German bad guys. I have to say in reading it, it makes sense that the style is what I remember since neither of the two main plot lines make a lot of sense and are full of holes and coincidences. What’s more interesting to me is that the art is more cartoonish than I would have thought based on the movie. The one thing of note is that the artist really likes drawing the female form in sheer fabrics – that’s where he goes for the “realism.” It’s an adventure comic studded with pinup girls.

 

 

On The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze.

 

Years ago, I read Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed. Afte reading that, I was interested in finding a good English language biography of Hjalmar Schacht because I was interested in seeing how the German War Machine ticked at a financial level. I didn’t find it then, but I came across this, and it was better than what I thought I wanted. Tooze goes into great detail about the war and how much the need for materials and food and hard currency really shaped the decisions the Nazi leadership were making about the war effort.

 

On a side note, reading this made me realize why reading about WWII or the Civil War is so appealing. You already know the outlines, but different histories just focus on different details. You know how it ends though. The bad guys lost. It’s a great feeling and not something you can guarantee with anything more contemporary.

 

On The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre.

 

This is one of those books that I normally wouldn’t have picked up, but I got it as a gift. I’m glad I read it though, as it was an intriguing look at the cold war and the espionage on both sides. It’s mainly the story of a KGB officer who moved up the ranks and spied for British intelligence. There’s also a bit about Aldrich Ames, but that part is not as developed and he’s not as interesting a character in the text. It’s a fast-paced read I couldn’t put down and it was enjoyable.

 

Structurally, there are a couple of places in the book that sort of give away the ending, which isn’t great since it is a thriller and if you don’t know the case, you don’t know how it’s going to end. Weirdly, though you’re in the spy world, there was something about it that felt both high and low stakes to me. It was like everyone involved was children playing high stakes games. The other thing is that the whole thing is biased to a western reader – with Gordievsky being on the side of the good (327) – when things really feel more ambiguous than that black and white reading.

 

Chantal Mouffe: Towards a Green Democratic Revolution

 

Verso has been putting out some of these thin books that are essays, and they are nice because they are a quick read in the afternoon. The problem is that they have to really grab you to be memorable, and Mouffe’s text did not do that for me.

 

Nature’s Metropolis

 

Look. There’s a lot of ways to do economic history. A lot of them are bad. Many are good. But there’s only one Nature’s Metropolis. It’s the story of Chicago. But it is more than that, it is the tale of the growth of the Republic in the nineteenth century. You will learn more about grain and trees and railroads than you thought you wanted to know and be thirsting for more.

 

On Managing & Using Information Systems: Pearlson et al.

 

This was the textbook for an entry-level MIS class in my data analytics course progression. Overall, I liked the text. The chapters were well laid out with well developed examples of the chapters’ main ideas that carried though the whole chapter. Each of the thirteen chapters could easily be a course in itself, but in paring down each topic to the most pertinent details, not much is lost in the legibility of the topic. The only thing I didn’t like was partially structural with my course. There are case studies at the end and the answers are hosted in various places online. My instructor used these as discussion prompts and it was clear a quarter of my peers just copied the answers and ran them through a remix software.