Books

[Captain K]

Yeah I included negative points along with positive.

I feel the Shaido were a pretty major disruption to the world, second only to the Seanchan.  Rand couldn't even stop them; it took Perrin and the Seanchan to do so.

[superaielman]

Egwene's not really a relevant character in the books until about halfway through. She matters a huge amount late, but early on she's just kind of there.  The entire point of the first half of the series is to get her trained by every faction but the white tower; she just sort of floats along in 5-6 until she becomes the head of the rebel faction  Nynaeve matters more to the story earlier than later; she fades in the background as Egwene comes to the forefront. She also finishes her character arc the earliest of the main characters, which makes sense considering she's the oldest and settles down with Lan in Book 7.


Moridin's the best of them for impact by far, but the strongest things he does in the series are before Rand or are off camera. The most effective of the Forsaken in books is Mesaana, just for the White Tower split and the damage she did to Rand's sanity. Rand was already the strongest channeler in the series by book 5; the way to hurt him was damage his mind and not go at him with the one power.

[Captain K]

Oh I forgot, Wheel of Time drinking game:

Drink every time a woman is referred to as "handsome".

[Grefter]

Ahhhhhhh you guys digging up old needles.  I don’t have time for a reread but maybe it is time to do it then actually read that last book.

Ta’Veren do not have to change the world themselves.  They impact the Weave, not necessarily events by themselves.  They just have to be there for change to happen.  It can completely happen through other people.  They tell you this over and over again in the books.  They can impact a lot of change and come into political power quite easily because of their circumstances, but it makes complete sense in world for someone other than the Ta’Veren to take more direct actions and have a bigger presence.


Edit - Moridin also is completely and totally a slave to the cycle.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Book 20 - The Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies - Reflections of Canada

This ‘book’ is a ~300 page collection of essays from public intellectuals in Canada about different subjects related to the past, present, and future of Canada. There is an essay for most major political issues, environmentalism, and different perspectives on race and identity in Canada. It’s an interesting read, for all that it is clearly written with a leftist slant.

Book 21 - Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage

I randomly decided to pick this up after researching books to read about the Civil War. It’s pretty short and an interesting read. Rather than glorifying war and making the story epic, it follows one protagonist who initially deserted but later came back and fought. The story ends with a discussion on what is ‘man-hood’. I thought it was a decent read, but not super exciting.

Book 22 - Eduardo Galeano- The Open Veins of Latin America

A novel on the history of colonialism in Latin America. It is very in-depth, covering all of the different parts of the colonial history from Spain/Portugal building cities all the way up until the plunder of Latin America via U.S. corporations. It talks in great details about all of the industries that set up shop in and took wealth out of Latin America and how that has hindered the growth of the region. I think that in North America we are often not taught a lot of Latin American history, so it was nice to read some in-depth stuff. It is a very heavy-hitting book with a clinical, almost obsessive retelling of injustice against the people of Central and South America. Interesting book regardless.

I probably won't end up hitting my goal of 26 books, but I hope to at least get to 24 by the end of the year!

[Luther Lansfeld]

Book 23  - Trevor McKenzie - Dive Into Inquiry

I picked up this book to try to learn how to set up more exploring-based labs in my classes, but it’s pretty fucking boring/repetitive.

Book 24 - Timothy Snyder - On Tyranny - Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone else is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.”

Interesting little mini-book that avoids talking about Trump but is clearly alluding to Trump’s tactics in its midst. It outlines a lot of things that 20th Century despots do and how we can avoid falling into those same traps. Pretty decent.

Book 25 - Kate Bornstein - A Queer and Pleasant Danger

Very interesting book about a trans woman and former Scientologist. It outlines some of the weirder things about Scientology and exposes how being a pretty high up person in that organization was. I was very interested the intimate look into what makes gender dysphoria/transphobia as so triggering for suicidal thoughts for trans women. The stuff about S&M and living as a sex slave, however, I found a little creepy and I skipped most of it.

I also tried reading Dune, but I found the abrupt POV change / third person omniscient to be kind of annoying.

One off from 26. Ah well. Next year?

[Luther Lansfeld]

The five books that I liked the most this year:

5. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Two Towers: I really had a good time with this book and I can really see why the Lord of the Rings series is a classic. Pretty much every part of the book involving any of the hobbits was intriguing. I especially loved Sam, Frodo, and Gollum’s scenes. Compared to the movie Two Towers, which overemphasizes battles and de-emphasizes relationships and Treebeard, I think that the book is a huge improvement. Plus, more Saramun, which is a treat. I also really liked the beginning with Boromir’s death and the aftermath of that.

4. Lois McMaster Bujold – Barrayar: It’s a nice, fast-paced, politics-based sci-fi book with complicated relationships, romance, and lots of action and tension. It has a great final act and has a cast of compelling, loveable characters. I plan to read Young Miles next year.

3. Elie Wiesel – Night: I consider myself someone pretty knowledgeable about the Holocaust, having gone to the Holocaust museum in D.C. as well as having read extensively about it, but this book gave a lot of insight on what it was like on the inside of Auschwitz and what it was like to be removed from your family and to struggle to survive in a concentration camp and the different people that he met there. It’s a really informative, well-written book and is pretty short. Well worth the read!

2. J.R.R. Tolkien – The Fellowship of the Ring: I think that the book is pretty similar in quality to The Two Towers overall, but Frodo is in the whole book instead of just parts of the book, and since I feel that Frodo is the series’ strongest character, I think that is a great benefit to the story. I really enjoyed the building tension in the story and I think that its setting work (even if some people call it plodding and boring) is really a great part of the book and sets up the rest of the series to be an enjoyable experience as well.

1. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale: This book is an all-time favorite. It explores religious fundamentalism as a vector of female oppression, and explores the gender politics and dynamics of the new society in a very real, relatable way. I think the story builds interest and tension more and more just by the opaque nature of the story and the lack of knowledge of the protagonist. Fred is an interesting character in the story that you are never sure how to feel about, and some of the reveals involving the main character’s former husband are also quite interesting. Thumbs up!

[Luther Lansfeld]

New year, new list.

1. John Norwich - Absolute Monarchs

Cid threw this out as a good book to read in chat. I’ve been perpetually in the middle of writing a novella that centers around a theocratic government, so a book about the real life version of that was something that I wanted to read. Overall? Very long but very interesting, and it sheds a lot of light on a point in history that I wasn’t really that aware of - pretty much everything in European / Turkish history from the Roman Empire to the French Revolution. If you are interested in reading a long book about the juicy ups and downs of the papacy, it’s a good one. The author is not as fond of John Paul II as I was expecting, and overall seems to have limited respect for the Catholic Church. I wouldn’t say it is an unfair portrayal, but the rampant nepotism that existed in the church for so long is a little alarming. To their credit, they got rid of most of the excesses of that by the 20th century, but obviously they made some blunders in the 20th century in both WWI (by kind of sitting by and letting it happen) and WWII (letting anti-Semitism go unabated due to their own anti-Semitic leanings). Inquisition and Crusades are both particularly ridiculous and totally destructive and unnecessary.

[Luther Lansfeld]

2. Christopher Browning - Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Much like last year, I decided to read a book about the Holocaust. This one is a little bit different than Night; it is less about the victims of the Holocaust and more of an analysis of the reasons why ordinary people ended up being complicit in and participating in the Final Solution.

The book is divided into the first part, which is primarily reporting the (mis)deeds of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland in the 1940’s. They were the equivalent of our National Guard, and because all of the real soldiers were in Russia, the reserves were recruited to participate in Operation Reinhard, which was the extermination of Jews in Poland. At first, many of these men were very reluctant to participate in shooting of civilians in villages, but as the job became more abstract (they were primarily in charge with guarding the trains to Treblinka, which was the deadliest death camp during WWII) and as they became more callous and used to the job, even ‘ordinary men’ placed their part as the workforce of genocide. It outlines several different events and shows different perspectives, ranging from people who mercilessly killed to people who actively avoided taking part in the killing.

The second part of the book asks why? Obviously having the facts and understanding what these people did is important to the analysis. These people weren’t huge Nazi fanboys or anything; the reserve police force, if anything, was home to some of the less fanatical people compared to the SS and SA. But yet, they participated anyway. The book concludes that a lot of the reason is the peer pressure of feeling ‘ashamed’ to leaving such a grizzly task to their friends and comrades, and it spirals from there. Obviously Nazi propaganda is also a part of it, but the author argues that the Nazi propaganda from afar was not the primary reason. He cites the studies done in psychology about electric shocks, and how people were more likely to be harsh if other people had done it first. After a while, these people largely accepted their roles as butchers, and some of them had latent sadism come up in their actions. His conclusion from all of this is that most humans are capable of great evil given the circumstances.

One interesting part was the interviews conducted on the members of the police battalion 25 years after the war. Many of them had very little or incorrect recollections of what had happened, and interestingly, when asked about the relationship between the Germans and Poles and the relationship between the Germans and Jews, they were very reluctant to ‘rat out’ their own for being evil and rarely expressed any overt anti-Semitism. However, when they were asked about the relationship between the Poles and the Jews, they were extremely detailed in their condemnation of Poles. The author speculated that they wanted to share the blame from their own misdeeds by saying that the Poles were bad too.

The last part of the book, which is an afterword, discusses the controversy that surrounded his book and how a researcher who opposed his views wrote a book about the unique German nature of virulent anti-Semitism. The author disagreed with that assessment, citing members of the reserve police that were from Luxembourg as well as the brutal treatment of Jews in Hungary and Romania. It is easier to believe that there is a uniqueness to the evils behind the Final Solution than to believe that evil lies within us.

I found the book extremely informative and thoughtful.

[superaielman]

Milgram strikes again. And yeah that sounds pretty on point with what I've read and studied as well, Ciato.


I recently read A Wrinkle in time. I might have read it as a kid, but I would have forgotten about it completely. Anyway, finished the book for my book club. It was pretty good. It's very much a children's book but a good one. It is very influnced by the age it's written in. The big villain was definitely a scary authortarian government (IE Communism) that controlled everything.

[Dark Holy Elf]

A Wrinkle in Time and its three sequels about Meg and/or her siblings were some of my favourite books as a pre-teen. Wrinkle in Time definitely has the most memorable antagonistic force as you note; it is obviously an analogue for hard-authoritarian (communist) government but it's a pretty effective one. One of my secret eye-popping moments playing DDS was getting to Bat's boss form (Camazotz) and discovering it was named after them (or rather that both were named after a Mayan god).

[Luther Lansfeld]

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/statistical-analysis-wheel-time/

[Captain K]

*looks at topic*  Nobody is talking about Oathbringer yet.  Super losing his mojo.

Oathbringer:  It is a Brandon Sanderson.  It is mostly about Dalinar's backstory.  Dalinar eating a steak is the greatest thing Sanderson has ever written.

Shallan POVs were annoying to read.  Her conversation with Wit is like reading two topics from r/iamverysmart.

Would have liked some Renarin POV.  He barely exists in this book.

Ending was great.  "Maybe it's time for someone to save you."

Not sure how many books Sanderson plans to write, but this feels about 60% done.

[Luther Lansfeld]

3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago (Abridged)

We read about Hitler, now let’s talk about his Soviet twin Stalin. The Gulag Archipelago, unlike the last book which is well-researched but done by a classic historian, this book is written by a survivor of the gulag and cobbled from first-person accounts of others also in the gulag. He actually had to hide his manuscripts and one of the original copies was actually taken by the KGB, but by hiding it in the house of an Estonian friend who had also been in the gulag previously, he was able to release the book in France (although he wanted it to be published in Russian). He was exiled from Russia for the crime of telling the truth. The Abridged version is about 1/2 or so of the original length? Not sure.

Despite my introduction to this review, this book goes through pains to outline Lenin’s role in gulag culture. While the post-WWII gulag’s enormity was definitely Stalin’s creation, Lenin was the person who originally implemented them in Russia, mostly as a place to hold political enemies and other inconvenient people. Actually, the idea of the labor camp was articulated by Marx in his work as well. The gulag can be traced back to the beginning of communism. However, it was popular in post-Stalin Russia to say that all of the horrible things that happened were just Stalin’s fault, when the truth was that many involved were complicit.

The author was put in a gulag in 1945. He was taken off the front line of the war for writing anti-government things in his letters to a friend who was also fighting in the war. The gulag was full of different types of folks; people who didn’t like communism, people who were Volga Germans, Estonians, Latvians, etc etc, as well as sometimes people who arbitrarily pissed off the gulag people. There was a law that was so broad in its scope that you could be arrested for almost anything called Article 58. In some ways, the most horrifying thing was that they sent many many POWs from WWII to gulags, because they feared their ‘westernization’. It is very interesting that Soviet Russia was so afraid of the introduction of alternate ideas to their country. And often, people were just thrown in to meet quotas. They would also extend the stay in the gulag for no real reason.

In some ways the book feels very… caught in the minutiae of life in the gulag, but the point was of course to expose the horror that was the gulag, following the story from the 42! torture methods of the gulag to the prison to the journey to labor camp to the labor camp. Which is simultaneously kind of tedious but also accents the arduousness of the journey. His commentary on the lack of efficacy of the hunger strike was one of the randomly interesting parts of the book. Previously, in tsarist Russia, people went on hunger strikes to emphasize the horrors of prison (which the author thinks was quite hilariously wussy compared to the gulag). In the gulag, however, no one knows where you are or gives a shit because the government hides all of the facilities, so the hunger strike is completely pointless.

The other part of the book that is quite fascinating is the commentary on life outside of the gulag, where people spent most of their time in constant fear of surveillance and constant vigilance against their neighbors. It created a culture where no one truly trusted one another, not even their family members and their spouses.

The author pretty much skewers everyone involved, but points out that, again, Russia is not a unique place where bad things happen, but that the culture built to devalue human life could happen anywhere.

No one seems to be certain, but the estimates are that up to 60 million people were imprisoned in the gulag during the system’s time.

4. Brandon Sanderson - Edgedancer

A light, fun romp, in contrast to the previous book. The main character is a crazy thief girl and she has a magical companion named Wyndle. The story sets up some nice character work for a couple of characters in Stormlight Archive, as well as just exposing what is going on outside of the main country where most of the action happens in the main series. Interesting little book, nothing too deep but I finished it pretty quickly.

[Dark Holy Elf]

*looks at topic*  Nobody is talking about Oathbringer yet.  Super losing his mojo.

I'm sure more people will talk about it when a version of the book comes out that isn't the physical size of a housecat. *armcross*

[Captain K]

It weighs considerably more than a housecat.

[Grefter]

I Will Be Gone In the Dark -  so my twitter feed was getting spammed about this because I follow Patton and had been avoiding letting myself pick it up just out of exposure.  Then there was excerpts posted.   It is really well written stuff  so eh I was sick on Monday so let’s get a book.  Highly recommend  it as they have done an amazing job of stitching together the loose threads of a nearly finished book about searching for a still unidentified serial murderer and rapist from the 70s-80s.  It slips in and out of documenting historical events to her recent investigations both on her own time and with former and current investigators on theirs.

I don’t normally do True Crime stuff for various reasons but this is really gentle and caring for the victims, very fair on the police investigations, very in-depth on its analysis but doesn’t wallow in gore porn.  It will spook the shit out of you but isn’t fear mongering.   A really fascinating read and a terrible shame she passed at a young age.


Esit - oh yeah and it is sappy as fuck but that doesn’t hurt it

[superaielman]

Re Sanderson: I still need to pick it up but I need to reread the previous books in the series. I like stormlight but it's a lot of work. And Gulag Archipeligo's a tough read. Definitely worth the time though.


I just finished reading the first 15 lives of Harry August and enjoyed it.  Concept is straightforward (Certain people are reborn over and over in the same life and remember everything), feels inspired a little by Groundhogs day.

[Sierra]

Thirding that Gulag Archipelago is a bracing and brutal but worthwhile read. I tried to read a couple of his forays into fiction and couldn't get into it, though.

Currently just rereading Discworld books, specifically running all the Watch novels.

[Captain K]

Okay I'll go ahead and post my spoiler thoughts for Oathbringer while it's still fresh in my head.  Major spoilers for Oathbringer and Cosmere in general follow.

So the major reveal this book is that the Parshendi are the native race of the world and the humans are the "Voidbringers" who came from another world.  The question is, which world?  I noticed a lot of verbal anachronisms in this book that are only relevant to the real world.  At first I chalked it up to a writing mistake that the editors didn't catch, but it happens often enough that I think it may be intentional.  Did the humans come from Earth?  Supposedly they brought their strange powers (surges) with them.  So did the Parshendi learn these surges from them?

It's also possible they came from the Mistborn world.  Allomancy and Feruchemy are casually namedropped at the very end of the book.  But if so, why do they use surges instead of allomancy?

Another recurring theme in Cosmere is that there are "gods" and that they are mortal in their own way (and seem to all be mortals who ascended to godhood).  Stormlight has three gods, Honor, Cultivation, and Odium.  Honor is dead, and probably came to the world with the Voidbringers.  Odium hates the humans, and uses the Parshendi to fight them.  However he has no love for the Parshendi either and just uses them as tools.  Could Odium actually be Ruin, escaped from the Mistborn world after being defeated?

Also interesting to note is that there are honorspren and voidspren, but also cultivationspren.  Wyndle being the notable example.  Are all spren just concepts and then molded by various forces into what they need?  We see that they can be changed in this book.

[superaielman]

Oof I should read Oathbringer but gods above is it a massive investment in terms of time and energy. Maybe later.

Just read Wool by Hugh Howey.  Very dark book but fun, does a great job as both a scifi piece and as sociological commentary.  The book starts in a society where everyone lives in a 100 + story underground silo; people have moved underground because the world is not habitable for humans.   It reminds me of Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter in terms of style (Underground society where the powerful live closer to the top). Just finished it, going to read the next two in the series.

[Luther Lansfeld]

5. Tony Judt - Postwar

Very long, very detailed history book on the history of two parallel dimensions after WWII - Western Europe and Eastern Europe. It talks about how Eastern Europe in many ways was betrayed by the West - particularly Poland, who ended up under Soviet control after WWII despite their fierce objections and their supposed alliance with Britain and France. It goes through the ups and downs of Western Europe during that time; student protests, resistance to colonialism, but all of the self-perceived trauma of Western European culture and their fear of American culture seeping into their value system is juxtaposed with the more visceral  and violent reality of Eastern Europe, including the Prague Spring and the Hungarian Revolution.

The book was careful to talk about all of the different parts of Europe at least a little bit, but the major players were more prominent, as you might expect. The book ended with a long discussion of the Yugoslav War and its disastrous effects on that part of the world, as well as the rise of Viktor Orban and Islamaphobia in modern Europe.

6. Neil Degrasse Tyson - Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

A quick science read, this book is fast-paced and engaging and can keep the layperson to astrophysics entertained. I think that a bit of a scientific knowledge is good to have before reading it though. It talks mostly about the composition of the stars,the formation of the universe, and Einstein and others’ work in postulating the existence of dark matter and dark energy, both of which very little is known about but compose the majority of the universe. At the end, it discusses the philosophy that talk about the smallness of earth makes people depressed, versus the reality which is that people just think it’s really damn cool.

[SnowFire]

Ciato: So what does Judt recommend the West "should" have done?  One of those possession is 9/10 of the law things, Poland had Soviet tanks sitting in it at the time.  The "West" did politely ask that the original Polish government that allied with the West be restored, but the Soviets would have had no reason to allow that since that government damn well remembered that the Soviets had allied with the Nazis to invade Poland, and had (still!) stolen part of Polish land, even if they then stole some compensatory German land to "make up" for it.  So, short of starting World War III, seems difficult to imagine what the right fix is.  Really the best option in the realm of alternate history would have been to end the war faster on the Western Front, where the Allies head east after Normandy immediately to Germany in 1944 and invade to force Hitler's government to fall, rather than finishing up in France then attacking Germany in 1945, IMO...  there's some salty comments that Eisenhower passed up a golden opportunity to do this.

Anyway...

Redshirts
I think LadyDoor mentioned this back when it came out in 2012, and Scalzi got discussed in passing on IRC a month or so ago.  Finally read this last week.  It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect, which is pretty good.  It did win a Hugo after all.  It's a funny novel that isn't, like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy level crazy - it's actually attempting to make sense of the impossible, and what it would really imply in a world where dopey sci-fi tropes happened where the reader/viewer/player would get bored by a briefing mission about the dangers of XYZ, and would rather have it directly demonstrated by having some extra die horribly.  As someone who both likes taking the "collateral damage" in stories seriously, as well as more generally trying to puzzle out some vaguely rational explanation for what could possibly explain dumb plot twist XYZ, this book was definitely up my alley.  It's nice & short too - very quick read, only took 2 days.

There's a pretty good interview with the author here for a sense of the book:
https://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156669439/writer-puts-expendable-redshirts-in-the-spotlight

Also note that despite John Scalzi being the evil Pope of SJWism according to the Sad Puppies later, this book really doesn't qualify.  It's not about an agender mixed race protagonist attempting to overthrow a thinly disguised metaphor for European imperialism or anything (if you WANT that, check out Ancillary Justice, of course), it's exactly the kind of crazy adventure that the Sad Puppies theoretically want.  But I guess they really don't like his pithy blog posts.  Well sucks to be them I guess.

[Luther Lansfeld]

I might have slightly misphrased that. From Poland's perspective, they were betrayed by the west. He pretty much agreed with your conclusion that it was hard for the West to take action in that circumstance.

[superaielman]

Flowers for Vashnoi- Vorkosigan short story. Enrique was a fun character to revisit and it was neat enough even if I'm not a huge fan of Kat. Related: Why is it that the most unquestionably positive mental image you get of Piotr in the series remains from freaking Cordelia?