Walking on the Moon

I’m not so much part of the target audience for Charles Stross’s Laundry Files books as I’m a member of its core constituency. His blend of fantasy and horror tropes, spy thriller homages, and computer systems in-jokes is pitch perfect to me.  There is a great joy in following the combination of humor and plot allusions and realizing what’s coming a beat or two before one of the characters explains it.

None of that would be worth anything if Stross put together a less diverting story behind the trappings.  He’s quite an excellent and fun writer, executing a good story populated with believable characters – even when they’re supernatural.

Strongly recommended.

I love to read history and I love to read Sarah Vowell.  I expected to love reading Lafayette. And I enjoyed it a great deal, but I didn’t love it.

Probably the aspect of Vowell’s writing that I love the most is her enthusiasm for her topics – especially when it’s America and history. Her first book that wasn’t a collection of columns, Assassination Vacation was full of excitement and gleeful asides. I had the impression that finding out everything she did was so exciting and so much fun that she couldn’t control the desire to tell everyone.

Better than that, she clearly could control that desire and turn that excitement into a wide-ranging, beautifully written book. It includes delightful historical facts, a sincere paean to the National Parks Service, and a dozen other merits. One of those merits is an ability to connect history and modern times with a brilliant turn of phrase.

All of these are present in Lafayette as well, but not to the same extent. There is a lot of the book that reads like a well-researched, well-written popular treatment of Lafayette’s time in America and its effect on our nation. That’s a great accomplishment, and we need more books like it. And yet, I miss the sparks that fly from every sentence in Vacation.

Recommended.

I’ve been skirting reading Borges for some time.  Several authors I greatly enjoy point to him as an influence.  Those pointers are always delivered in the sort of hushed tones that one reserves for the influential and unique. A close friend recently recommended Borges’s work and that was the kick I needed to actually go get some.  Hushed tones from Warren Ellis are one thing, but no reason for avoiding the experience sounded good when I tried to say them out loud.

The short stories in Ficciones turn out to be witty and playful in an intellectual sense.  Borges takes an idea and runs as far as he can with it, often under the guise of a literary review. Creating a fictional writer who exemplifies whatever odd approach he wants to explore and then critiquing that author seems the long way around, but the structure is generally powerful and engaging.  He manages to convey the idea of taking himself too seriously and not seriously at all in the same constructs.

It helps that his writing is both technically brilliant and fantastically dense. The first paragraph or two of one of his stories often contains the whole of the story.  The remaining pages simply illuminate it from other angles, as a hologram.  Most of these are master classes in composition and structure.  Often this is where I say an author makes that look easy.  Not Borges.  It looks like he worked hard to get these stories perfect.

Overall, these stories are rewarding and entertaining on many levels, but expect to invest time to reap those benefits.

Strongly recommended.

Stone Mattress collects several of Margaret Atwood’s recent short stories.  The collection seems a lot like a series of etudes. In the notes she mentions that several are from stunt collections – authors produce works within loose but binding constraints.  Etudes are often interesting, but rarely satisfying.  So it goes here.

The collection certainly has its enjoyable passages.  This is Margaret Atwood, after all.  every story has at least one passage that is worth reading the whole story for, even if the passage is taken in isolation.  Most of the works do considerably better than that, having some structural or thematic points of interest that are unexpected at the outset.

Still, these stories feel fluffier than Atwood’s long fiction.  Worth it if you like to see a great writer noodling around on the keyboard.

Recommended.

Dale Gronic’s Tales is misnamed.  There are some stories in here, but by and large they aren’t fascinating anecdotes.  Largely Tales is a fairly ad hoc study of the Steelers’ draft classes.  I will say that the Steelers’ draft history turns out to be pretty checkered – much more so than I realized – but this treatment doesn’t capture things very well.

From Gronic’s research, it does seem clear that a book about the Steelers’ drafts would be interesting.  The various coaches have had widely varying philosophies on the role of the draft in team building.  When coaches are changing every few years, this can lead to extremely unusual personnel. Furthermore, each coaching staff brought different skills to the draft. It was common to have a principled plan and a poor eye for talent, that added further noise to the signal.

The 1970’s dynasty was as much a product of the staff’s continuity as its philosophy, but both contributed to some incredible years.

Now, as interesting as that analysis is, it doesn’t fit well with the title.  That title promises me great stories from exciting characters or interesting games.  This is pretty much lacking.  Gronic primarily follows a few draftees who would grant him interviews and tells their history in Pittsburgh.  This is diverting (at best) but never compelling.

Laurie Penny is a feminist.  She’s not a feminist in the way that many dilettantes – and I include myself here – are.  She is a deep thinker on matters of sex, gender, and society.  She’s also a vivid, engaging writer.  She’s compassionate without excusing accidental sins.  Her writing is passionate and analytical at the same time.  Readers always know a person is speaking, but never hear someone excusing poor thought with emotional language.

Her book, Unspeakable Things, largely reflects these brilliant qualities. It’s a fine introduction to feminist thought in our modern, daily, technical world. If you’re interacting with people on the internet, it’s a great book to read.  If you’re thinking about why women’s issues and diversity issues are moving to the core of so many discussions, the book is a must. It has ramifications for hard core techies, too, but that’s not what I mean by “technical world.”

Unspeakable Things expanded my thinking about these issues from the personal to the political.  Other friends and Internet writers have made me understand how often and effectively individuals’ rights are trampled.  Penny showed me how these same attitudes and the mores and laws that they have spawned create our society.  Viewing that society in terms of how those mores and laws control and constrain populations in society was new to me.  It’s the difference between sympathizing with people who have been harassed and seeing that the same attitudes prevent women from taking part in the world. Things is very effective at opening the mind.

Particularly enlightening to me was the discussion of birth control.  That’s a technical innovation that could restructure society, except for the fact that society – people who make it up – are resisting that technical change.  As powerful as the personal stories one often hears are (both sides) – the political issues are at least as important.  Penny brought those to me.

Unspeakable Things is not a perfect book, of course.  There are times when I found the writing repetitious.  Some parts were more opaque than others. I can’t tell if it will make others think new thoughts as it made me do.

Overall, the ideas in here are powerful and the writing accessible.  Strongly recommended.

Rusted Blood is triumph of setting and tone from Warren Ellis. Ellis is a man of strangely eclectic tastes, even for a writer.  The Elektrograd setting comes from a long standing fascination of his with architecture or an interesting brutalist bent.  He’s done a brilliant job constructing a city of such architecture and reflecting its tastes into his characters.  The result is a grim police procedural that you can’t take your eyes off.

Rusted Blood is fairly short – a long short story or a short novella.  It’s easy to swallow in one gulp, which enhanced its immersiveness for me.  I think Ellis can sustain the effect for longer, but a short stay in this world was fine for me.

I don’t want to spoil the mystery – though I didn’t find it to be even the third most interesting aspect of Blood – so I don’t have much more to say.  This is an inexpensive, short, absorbing tale.  Risk the two bucks.

Strongly recommended.

One of the many interesting things about living in Los Angeles is how much Japanese and Hawaiian history permeates the environment.  Incidents and trends that are completely alien outside are part of the local cultural landscape.  Intellectually I know this is true, and I’ve read other hidden histories. There’s something about the combination of the uniqueness of the Japanese culture and the locality of the references that makes hidden Japanese history particularly compelling to me.

Valerie J. Matsumoto’s City Girls is a slice of the Nisei life rooted in WWII and women’s lives.  It chronicles the rise and influence of girls’ social groups in Los Angeles from the 20’s and 30’s through the Second World War and Japanese-American internment through the early 1950s.  Part social clubs, part support groups, part cross cultural meme breeding grounds, these clubs shaped and reflected women’s experiences as Japanese groups became Nisei groups.  There’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot to learn.

While the groups are vivid and lively, and their evolution and influence fascinating, Matsumoto’s presentation is unflaggingly scholarly.  This is completely understandable.  Her goal is to document these groups for posterity.  This is a serious work of scholarship and journalism, and the tone is entirely correct for it. It can make parts of the read slow going for an outsider to the time and the culture, but more than makes up for it in clarity and completeness.

Matsumoto brings the full picture of the groups and people who made them up out sharply.  It’s enlightening and compelling history in both the large and the small.

Strongly recommended.

Cunning Plans is a collection of talks and notes for talks that Warren Ellis has given over the last few years. I suspect that the talks were a tad more lively when given and that the text here is a pale substitution.  The preparation and notes do give a look into the workings of a mind I find very interesting.  You will know pretty quickly if it will be interesting or not.  The book is a $1 kindle single, and it’s hard not to float the buck just to see what’s on Ellis’s mind.

Recommended.

Winston Groom’s The Aviators takes a look at some of the men who most changed the face and scope of aviation in the 20th Century.  The fact that he looks at only three people who found themselves at the center of international attention as often as they did says something about how rough and tumble aviation was, and perhaps still is.  The Aviators provides an overview of the aviation careers of Eddie Rickenbacher, Jimmy Doolitle, and Charles Lindbergh.  Again, it’s fascinating that so many qualifiers are needed in that sentence.  This is an overview – Richenbacher has more to say about himself than Groom can reasonably allot to him; on the other side, Lindbergh’s contributions to medical prosthetics and ecology are shoved out.

Without covering any of the men in detail there’s still plenty to say.  While I imagine one could produce a boring work about these three, they don’t make it easy.  Just hitting the high points:

Rickenbacher:

• Was the US Ace of Aces in WWI
• Ran Eastern Airlines profitably for decades
• Was nearly killed in an Eastern crash
• Crashed during WWII and spent 24 days on a life raft in the Pacific

Doolittle:

• Designed, built and flew the first instrument approaches
• Was at the center of nearly every controversial discussion about military aviation between the World Wars
• Personally led the famous one-way raid on Tokyo that both acted as a symbol of American resolve after Pearl Harbor and shifted Japanese defence posture in the Pacific make it possible for the US to restore their presence there.

Lindbergh:

• Became an international celebrity for being the first to fly from New York to Paris non-stop (and solo).
• Defended and promoted aviation causes for years between the the world wars
• Studied and improved the operation techniques of the P-38 Lightning in the Pacific, providing significant enough improvements to change the course of the war in the Pacific.  And flew combat missions as a civilian.

There’s no shortage of incident or impact, and Groom brings it all to life accurately and with some flair.  Overall it’s a great way to whet a reader’s appetite for deeper histories of the period.

Recommended