If so, you really ought to read this post:
Every single Vorkosigan book available for free from Baen
If you’ve never plunged into the mysteries and adventures of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, now is the time to do it. Every novel and story is available for free at Baen right now, in a variety of formats.
Here’s the link. Have fun!
As a dabbler in economic thought (but not an economist), I’m always interested in new books on different aspects of economics. Robert Fulford has probably prompted me to buy Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World:
In a time of sharply limited budgets, this gives a special urgency to the ideas of Deirdre McCloskey, an economic historian at the University of Illinois. She thinks she knows how economic growth works.
Why did northwestern Europe begin growing rich in the 17th century, a process that continues to this moment? Why did various countries elsewhere in Europe have similar success, along with countries created by Europeans, including the United States and Canada?
McCloskey sets aside most of the reasons for prosperity that her academic peers identify. Scientific innovation, natural resources, education, Protestant theology, trade agreements — these can be important but they do not explain global patterns. Often, they are present in societies that have failed.
The West’s success, McCloskey believes, turns out to be a question of imagination, attitude and sensibility. It depends on how we talk and write about business — in fact, how people in the West feel about it.
Fulford also points out that McCloskey has had a very unusual life:
It’s not possible to write about McCloskey without noting the most remarkable aspect of her life, which she described eleven years ago in Crossing: A Memoir. In 1995, Donald McCloskey, a 52-year-old professor, married for 30 years, a father of two, realized that his real identity was as a woman. He began a program of hormone treatment, multiple surgeries and electrolysis, emerging as Deirdre.
As a scholar, she noted that this physical change involved a cultural transformation as well. Having been both a man and a woman, she drew up a long list of changes she’s discovered in herself. Here are a few of them. She cries, she likes cooking, she’s more easily startled by loud noises, she listens intently to stories people tell of their lives and craves detail. She can’t remain angry for long. She’s less impatient, drives less aggressively, has more friends. She’s stopped paying attention to cars and sports. And she feels duty-bound to wash the dishes.
H.L. Mencken was a literary giant in the 1920s and into the 1930s, but fell from the pinnacle of popularity as the Great Depression hit. His consistent opposition to FDR and the New Deal moved him further and further away from the limelight, and his outspoken opposition to the war rendered him all but unpublishable from 1941 until his death. A large collection of his shorter works from 1914 through 1927 were published in Prejudices, running to six volumes.
The books are back in print, in two large volumes, through Library of America. An excerpt from the New York Review of Books just starts to get interesting before the cut-off for non-subscribers:
The material that H.L. Mencken published in a series of six volumes under the title Prejudices was a collection of his journalism written between 1914 and the late 1920s. Most of it, he told a good friend on publication of the first volume in 1919, was “light stuff” with an occasional “blast from the lower woodwind” that would “outrage the umbilicari, if that is the way to spell it.” Such books, he added, were “mere stinkpots, heaved occasionally to keep the animals perturbed.”
Most of the pieces in the first volume — or “series,” as it was called — had originally appeared in The Smart Set, the magazine he had edited since 1914, but they also included articles published in newspapers, as well as material written especially for the book. A painstaking editor of his own work, Mencken also did a good bit of rewriting; stinkpot or not, this was not to be a quick harum-scarum hustling of secondhand goods but a high-quality piece of prose from a master.
Its commercial success surprised him as well as his friend and publisher, Alfred Knopf, who seemed to realize for the first time that Mencken had a promising future, or, as he expressed it to his author, “that H.L. Mencken has become a good property.” The book was quickly followed by Prejudices: Series Two, Series Three, and so on to a final Series Six in 1927, by which time Mencken had developed from a good property into the most exciting literary figure in the country.
H/T to Mark at Unambiguously Ambidexterous for the link.
I have to admit that “steampunk” never really made it onto my regular reading list. I rather like some of the artwork and created artifacts, but the actual stories don’t grab me. Charles Stross isn’t a fan, either:
I am becoming annoyed by the current glut of Steampunk that is being foisted on the SF-reading public via the likes of Tor.com and io9.
It’s not that I actively dislike steampunk, and indeed I have fond memories of the likes of K. W. Jeter’s “Infernal Devices”, Tim Powers’ “The Anubis Gates”, the works of James Blaylock, and other features of the 1980s steampunk scene. I don’t have that much to say against the aesthetic and costumery other than, gosh, that must be rather hot and hard to perambulate in. (I will confess to being a big fan of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius.) It’s just that there’s too damn much of it about right now, and furthermore, it’s in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect. (The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist’s work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.)
We’ve been at this point before with other sub-genres, with cyberpunk and, more recently,
paranormal romancefang fuckersbodice rippers with vamp-Sparkly Vampyres in Lurve: it’s poised on the edge of over-exposure. Maybe it’s on its way to becoming a new sub-genre, or even a new shelf category in the bookstores. But in the meantime, it’s over-blown. The category is filling up with trashy, derivative junk and also with good authors who damn well ought to know better than to jump on a bandwagon. (Take it from one whose first novel got the ‘S’-word pinned on it — singularity — back when that was hot: if you’re lucky, your career will last long enough that you live to regret it.) Harumph, young folks today, get off my lawn ….
An article encapsulating some of the key points of Amity Schlaes’ The Forgotten Man in PDF form:
We all know the traditional narrative of that event: The stock market crash generated an economic Katrina. One in four was unemployed in the first few years. It resulted from a combination of monetary, banking, credit, international, and consumer confidence factors. The terrible thing about it was the duration of a high level of unemployment, which averaged in the mid teens for the entire decade.
The second thing we usually learn is that the Depression was mysterious — a problem that only experts with doctorates could solve. That is why FDR’s floating advisory group — Felix Frankfurter, Frances Perkins, George Warren, Marriner Eccles and Adolf Berle, among others — was sometimes known as a Brain Trust. The mystery had something to do with a shortage of money, we are told, and in the end, only a Brain Trust’s tinkering with the money supply saved us. The corollary to this view is that the government knows more than American business does about economics.
Another common presumption is that cleaning up Wall Street and getting rid of white-collar criminals helped the nation recover. A second is that property rights may still have mattered during the 1930s, but that they mattered less than government-created jobs, shoring up home-owners, and getting the money supply right. A third is that American democracy was threatened by the rise of a potential plutocracy, and that the Wagner Act of 1935 — which lent federal support to labor unions — was thus necessary and proper. Fourth and finally, the traditional view of the 1930s is that action by the government was good, whereas inaction would have been fatal. The economic crisis mandated any kind of action, no matter how far removed it might be from sound monetary policy. Along these lines the humorist Will Rogers wrote in 1933 that if Franklin Roosevelt had “burned down the capital, we would cheer and say, ‘Well at least we got a fire started, anyhow.’”
To put this official version of the 1930s in terms of the Monopoly board: The American economy was failing because there were too many top hats lording it about on the board, trying to establish a plutocracy, and because there was no bank to hand out money. Under FDR, the federal government became the bank and pulled America back to economic health.
When you go to research the 1930s, however, you find a different story. It is of course true that the early part of the Depression — the years upon which most economists have focused — was an economic Katrina. And a number of New
Deal measures provided lasting benefits for the economy. These include the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the push for free trade led by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the establishment of the modern mortgage format. But the remaining evidence contradicts the official narrative. Overall, it
can be said, government prevented recovery. Herbert Hoover was too active, not too passive — as the old stereotypes suggest — while Roosevelt and his New Deal policies impeded recovery as well, especially during the latter half of the decade.
H/T to Monty for the link.
A few years back, on the old blog, I mentioned that the Orwell Trust was publishing George Orwell’s diary in blog form. It’s now up to October 1940:
19.10.40
The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.
Next book on the reading list:
Update: I’m reminded that you can sample the first few chapters of Cryoburn at the Baen website.
The Female Character Flowchart looks at “the one- and two-dimensional female characters we see over and over again in modern fiction.”
Click image to see full size flowchart
H/T to Royce McDaniels for the link.
Mitch Miller, drawing upon years of “men are simple/women are complicated” media memes, responded:
Wow! That’s a lot of female characters, considering that there’s only five male characters:
The Good Guy
The Bad Guy
The Good Bad Guy
The Bad Good Guy
and
The Sidekick
I’m being self-sacrificing, having sent my copy off with Victor when he went back to campus yesterday, so this review by Cory Doctorow just highlights what I’ll get to read in a couple of week’s time:
Terry Pratchett’s newly released I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth volume in the Tiffany Aching books, about a young girl born to be the witch of a chalky, sheep-farming area called, simply, The Chalk (the other three volumes being Wee Free Men, Hatful of Sky and Wintersmith). Tiffany’s old gran was the “Wise Woman” of the hills, and her gifts came down to Tiffany, who, at the age of 7 or 8, began to need them — first to rescue the Baron’s son when he was kidnapped by the Queen of Faerie (Tiffany hit her with an iron frying pan) and then to learn proper magic while apprenticed to a real witch, and finally to kiss the Wintersmith during a morris dance, and then have to set the seasons to right.
In Midnight, Tiffany returns. Now she’s 16, and she has assumed all the burdens of being The Chalk’s witch — and they are burdensome — delivering the babies, salving the wounds, clipping the neglected old ladies’ toenails, changing the bandages, and using magic to take away the pain of the Baron, who is dying.
As if being thrust into an early maturity wasn’t enough, witchery has fallen into disrepute on The Chalk — and seemingly everywhere. There are old ladies being crushed and drowned by mobs, there are the whispers and the forked fingers to fight the evil eye when Tiffany passes, and then, when the Baron dies while Tiffany eases him into the next world, there is the wildfire rumor that Tiffany killed him.
This series is a wonderful read for both children and adults: Pratchett’s sense of humour and his touch of magical-but-real provide a great read for both audiences. Highly recommended, especially if you haven’t already become a fan of his main Discworld series.
From an interview with CultureLab:
I am putting the finishing touches on Rule 34, as in rule 34 of the internet, which says if you can imagine it, there’s a porn community around it somewhere on the internet. It’s my big gay near-future Scottish police procedural, featuring alarming and innovative business models for organised crime, Gangster 2.0 and iMob. Most business models for organised crime would be familiar to Al Capone, so the California venture capital community is funding criminal start-ups with new models. It’s about 15 years out, and about 90 per cent of it is familiar right now, but the other 10 per cent will be unspeakably weird and strange, and perhaps 1 per cent of that will be beyond your imagination. It will be published next year.
I’m in the middle of starting a new novel right now, and the bad thing about that strange phase of existence is that everything you see and hear somehow relates, in the wankmulch your brain has become, to that novel. Even a shopping list becomes a mass of notation and connective lines — because you’re convinced that the six things on it reveal something phenomenal about the world and your place in it, and there’s a place in the novel where you can shove all that in.
Deep down, there’s a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world.
Also it’s important to note that when writers — or at least I — get into this condition, we talk very fast and make not a lot of sense.
Warren Ellis, “Ghosting the real world”, Wired (UK), 2010-10-07
By way of Walter Olson’s Twitter feed, a story of real life arbitrage — the Confessions of a Used Book Salesman:
I make a living buying and selling used books. I browse the racks of thrift stores and library book sales using an electronic bar-code scanner. I push the button, a red laser hops about, and an LCD screen lights up with the resale values. It feels like being God in his own tiny recreational casino; my judgments are sure and simple, and I always win because I have foreknowledge of all bad bets. The software I use tells me the going price, on Amazon Marketplace, of the title I just scanned, along with the all-important sales rank, so I know the book’s prospects immediately. I turn a profit every time.
I’m pretty sure I first heard about the practice of shopping for books with laser scanners in a story on NPR, which, as I recall it, disparaged their use as classless. And, really, it is precisely this. The book merchant of the high-cultural imagination is a literate compleat and serves the literate. He doesn’t need a scanner, because he knows more than the scanner knows. I fill a different niche — I deal in collectible or meaningful books only by accident. I’m not deep, but I am broad. My customer is anyone who needs a book that I happen to find and can make money from.
My economics side says this is a good thing: connecting buyers with their desired purchases. My bibliophile side says this is somehow morally wrong . . . or if not precisely wrong, then tainted or shady. I’m not sure how to reconcile my feelings.
P.J. O’Rourke has a new book coming out soon:
O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the “Animal House” era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls “ass cancer,” continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards” (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose “Wealth of Nations” he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. Among his best one-liners:
* “The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.”
* “We’re individuals — unique, disparate, and willful, as anyone raising a household of little individuals knows. And not one of those children has ever written a letter to Santa Claus saying, ‘Please bring me and a bunch of kids I don’t know a pony and we’ll share.’ “
* “The most sensible request of government we make is not, ‘Do something!’ But ‘Quit it!’ “
* “Conservatism is a flight from ideas. As in, ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ ‘What’s the big idea?’ and ‘Whose idea was that?’ “
O’Rourke, 62, is a cool Republican. It’s a lonely job. What can the rest of the party do to join him?
“I don’t think Republicans have ever been cool,” he says. “Abraham Lincoln tried growing a beard.”
Yes, and look what happened to him.
“It’s always going to be cooler to have wild visionary ideas for society and the future. All we can really do is see that we’ve got a society where as many people grow out of cool as fast as they possibly can.”
H/T to Paul Davis for the link.
There is another lit crit thing — I consider it a perversion, myself — that they call “reading with critical distance”. From the writer’s point of view, it as if one has knocked oneself out to prepare a bang-up with-all-the-trimmings Thanksgiving dinner, and had one’s guests troop in, weigh and measure the viands and photograph the table — and then depart having eaten not one bite.
It’s dinner, dammit. You’re supposed to eat it, and be nourished.
And then sit around discussing it, sure, and ask for the recipes, and exchange cooking tips and anecdotes and tales of dinners past, and so on to the limits of the metaphor.
Reading with critical distance only seems to me very nearly the same as not reading at all. For one thing, such a reader is very likely to miss all the essential emotional connections evoked between the lines. To switch metaphors, it’s like serving to a tennis player who stands there and doesn’t hit the ball back, watches it roll off to the side of the court, and then says, “I don’t see the point of this game.”
Bash ’em with me racket, I will…
So whoever it was who was finding this sort of analysis disturbing, I suspect what was happening was you were being pulled out of a former full engagement with the story by this sort of approach to the text, and rightly feeling that something valuable was being taken away, without necessarily being replaced with something of equal or greater value. Trying to hold both modes of reading in one’s brain at the same time must be kind of like having Simon Illyan’s memory chip in place. It may be best to take turns with the two modes.
Supposedly, training to critical reading makes one “a better reader” but if it results in one being able to happily read far fewer books, I’m not exactly sure where the merit lies. It’s like the hazard of revisiting beloved books of one’s childhood, and finding them swapped as if by bad fairies with inferior changelings. How can one call oneself a better reader as an adult if one is clearly having a much worse read…?
Lois McMaster Bujold, email to the LMB mailing list, 2010-10-01
Patricia Wrede had some disturbing discoveries when she tried to look up book banning incidents for a panel discussion:
[. . .] I told them about the teacher who almost got fired when a parent objected to her reading Calling on Dragons in her classroom, because “it taught witchcraft!” I mentioned the fellow YA author who was disinvited from a school visit (these are day-long programs where an author talks to several classes worth of kids and usually has lunch with the teachers, and for some YA authors, they contribute a goodly chunk to their income) because a parent noticed a title on her extensive bibliography that “sounded occult” (it was a mystery, with not a whiff of the supernatural anywhere in the text). I pointed out the well-publicized attempts to suppress the Harry Potter books (the series is #1 on the ALA’s top ten most challenged books of the decade for 2000-2009), and a few less-well-publicized attempts to remove from school shelves things like The Wizard of Oz (because Dorothy is too independent and solves her own problems), The Lord of the Rings (because it is “Satanic”), and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (because the stories are “too violent”).
None of this was, I thought, stop-the-presses news — certainly not to anyone who writes fantasy. But the other writers at the table were shocked all over again. One of them happened to be on the program committee for the regional conference, and she went home and put the panel together.
When she asked me to be on the panel, I immediately said yes, and then I went off to the internet to do some research. I wanted some examples that would hit closer to home. I found quite a lot, but as I looked through the web sites, I noticed something interesting. I live in Minnesota. All of the descriptions of book-banning incidents in Minnesota were from the websites of organizations based in distant states: Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Georgia.
So I poked a little more. There were quite a few local web sites publicizing Banned Books Week, and all of them did indeed have descriptions of surprising book-banning incidents. Incidents that took place in other states, like Texas, Georgia, and California.
Powered by WordPress