Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
Redemption Ark by Alistair Reynolds.
The second part of the Inhibitor trilogy. Nice enough read. Reynolds can't do love scenes, or feelings at all for that matter, but makes up for it in plot and sense-of-wonder.
Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.
An entertaining if uneven romp through a universe where nanotech disrupts post-Tsarist colony worlds and where an uploaded civilisation does all it can do to prevent entities from changing the past, thus editing them out of history.
A big part of the book (a bit too long) is a hilarious sendup of the kind of neo-Napolonic space navies as described by David Weber in the Honor Harrington series.
Blood, Tears and Folly: an objective look at World War II by Len Deighton.
I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Deighton's Goodbye Mickey Mouse didn't impress me, but this is a nice "amateur" history of WWII. Contains nice backgrounds to the different conflicts, with and emphasis on the tech aspects of the war.
I've really read too much about the Second World War. The problem is that the war's status (in the US at least) as "the last good war", together with the "Band of Brothers" aesthetics and the multitude of video games set there almost make the whole thing like a comic book. Despite the blood and guts falling out, the war is still like those 50's and 60's comics where heroic Brits and Yanks fight against Krauts and Yaps.
The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod (re-read).
Fscking brilliant. 'Nuff said.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
Compulsively readable, like everything Gibson has written. But the beginning is much better than the end, which feels contrived and flat.
Like Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, this book shows that good SF is really about our own time.
The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod (re-read).
Continuing my MacLeod jag. This is also not as good The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, but as a plausible utopia, it kinda works.
The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod (re-read).
The final installment of McLeod's series of books about the fall and rise of a socialist-anarchist society.
Possibly the weakest of the four, but enjoyable none the less.
Update: Ken MacLeod has a blog. The things you find when you putz around the 'Net...
Flight of Passage by Rinker Buck.
A well-written, poignant memoir about two boys and their flight from New Jersey to California, both honouring and removing themselves from their difficult father.
Imperium, by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
A travel writer mostly known for his writings on the Third World, Kapuscinski tells us about his encounters with the Imperium -- Russia, first in its Czarist incarnation, then as the Soviet Union, and lastly stumbling towards a new system, which seems unlikely to be democracy in the Western sense.
From the harrowing account of his childhood in Soviet-occupied Poland, to the recollections of camp inmates in Magadan and the tragedy of Armenia, Kapuscinski paints a bleak picture of a great country plundered and murdered by generations of ruthless rulers.
This passage sums up the Soviet period. A batch of deportees has arrived in Magadan after a freezing sea voyage. They are counted, slowly, by illiterate guards:
The half-naked deportees stood motionless in a blizzard, lashed by the gales. Finally, the escorts delivered their routine admonition: A step to the left or a step to the right is considered an escape attempt -- we shoot without warning! This identical formula was uniformly applied throughout the entire territory of the USSR. The whole nation, two hundred million strong, had to march in tight formation in a dictated direction. Any deviation to the left or the right meant death.
A democratic future in Russia seems unlikely:
The Russian land, its characteristics and resources, favor the power of the state. The soil of native Russia is poor, the climate cold, the day, for the greater part of the year, short. Under such natural conditions, the earth yields meager harvests, there is recurrent famine, the peasant is poor, too poor to become independent. The master or the state has always had enormous power over him. The peasant, drowning in debt, has nothing to eat, is a slave.
On the future:
And yet this country's future can be seen optimistically. Large societies have great internal strength. They have sufficient vital energy and inexhaustible supplies of all kinds of power so as to be able to raise themselves up from the most grievous setbacks and emerge from the most serious crises.
Update: Just saw a TV programme about Kapuscinski, A Poet of the Frontline. So now I'm adding The Emperor to my reading list.
Brev fr�n nollpunkten by Peter Englund.
A collection of essays about the defining moments of the last century: the First World War, the Great Terror, the Holocaust, the Allied bombings of Germany and Japan, and the atomic bomb over Nagasaki.
Also contains an essay about the eery similarities of Nazi and Stalinist architecture.
Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds.
Space Opera in the hard SF mould. Full of cool neologisms (lighthugger, reefersleep) and well-written, despite a predilection for the word caul.
Maybe it's the fact that I've read it before, but the scenes of carnage and mayhem seem a little bloodless, and the characters aren't as fleshed-out as they could be. Entertaining none the less.
(Title shamelessly stolen from P.M. Agapow's review of a different novel.)
Space opera in the Iain M. Banks mould, with bold sweeping vistas and more or less dysfunctional characters. Unlike Banks, this is hard SF, which means that the speed of light is still an absolute limit. Other than this, anything goes.
Reading this prompted me to re-read Revelation Space, the first novel set in this universe, and after just a few pages I can say that this novel is not up to the standards set by that one. Despite this, it is an entertaining read and more well written than most.
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux.
This is the best book I've read in a long time. Partly because of the great writing, partly because my own background growing up in Kenya, and partly for the fact that Theroux has mellowed quite a bit. I remember his alter-ego in My Secret History as a prick, which is perhaps ungenerous as that book is a novel. His previous travel books have also left a sour taste in my mouth, but here he's much more generous to the people he meets.
The chapter on Kenya is depressing, as my memories of childhood there are happy, and I could see a bit of what he describes when we went back some years ago.
Two books have been added to my reading list after this chapter:
A point Theroux makes when visiting Malawi, where he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Sixties, is that only Africans can help Africa. The vast influx of foreign aid and charity hasn't helped much. I'm sure that Africa's problems are not due to aid and charity -- the effects of colonialism and unfair trade practices by the rich world are much bigger factors -- but aid hasn't helped.
Theroux paints a bleak picture of a continent that just can't be able to get its act together. He offers no solutions, only observations. But those are made with such clarity that the reader is left with the feeling that things will get better, one day.
PS Cecil Rhodes dreamt of an railway from the Cape to Cairo. Theroux has no such dreams, and he travels in the other direction.
A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour by John Feinstein.
I now know more than I thought I ever wanted to know about professional golf in the US. Synopsis: it's damn hard, but if you're good and lucky, you too can fly to tournaments in a private jet.
The first sports book I've read, interesting experience. All aspects of society are filled with jargon. If you know nada about golf, read something else. If you know the difference between a birdie and a bogey, it's recommended.
Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks.
Although Banks' Culture novels are always enjoyable, this one feels like he's coasting.
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick.
A well written popular history of nonlinear dynamics.
Boys and Girls Forever by Alison Lurie.
A collection of essays about childrens literature.
Svenska f�rintelsevapen by Wilhelm Agrell.
A history of the Swedish plans to build WMDs, specifically a plutonium bomb and VX and mustard gas.
Never got past the planning stage due to politics and a new sense of the term "international security".
The last chapter has interesting info concerning Iraq's gas and nuclear programmes after Gulf War 1.
Body of Secrets by James Bamford.
An "expos�" of the NSA. This book has a hacked-together feel, as if it was composed of several magzine articles. The author veers from describing the NSA as an all-knowing threat to democracy and liberty, to telling us about glitches, catastrophes, and bureaucracy hampering the Agency's ability to protect the US from it's enemies.
There's some interesting information in here though (assuming that the information is accurate):
The description of how Israel attacked a Sigint ship during the Six Days War.
The capture of another Sigint ship by the North Koreans in 1969.
How the Viet Minh could monitor US radio traffic during the Vietnam war, as the Americans didn't bother to use communication security.
The sum of the book seems to be that, yes, the NSA can listen to every phone call and read every mail, but that they don't have enough qualified people to make sense of what they're picking up.
Must ... install ... GPG ...
Venona: sp�ren fr�n ett underr�ttelsekrig by Wilhelm Agrell.
A history of the Venona telegrams intercepted in Sweden during the Second World War, and the implications of their decoding on the revelations of Soviet espionage in Sweden during the period.
Man, that was a long sentence.
Agrell describes the Venona decrypts as the "Dead Sea Rolls of the Cold War". The limited decryption of the traffic meant that the recovered plaintext nearly raised more questions than it answered.
Love and War in the Appenines by Erik Newby.
Inspired by the Colditz book I re-read this classic of escape literature.
Of course, this being Newby, it is also very funny.
Colditz: the Definitive History by Henry Chancellor.
An entertaining history of the famous WW2 POW camp.
The most interesting thing about this book is the fact that Colditz, despite being the "prison of last resort" for repeat escapers and Deutschfeindlich, was actually more humane than many other places in Nazi Germany. Compared to concentration, extermination, and slave labour camps, it was a "bad hotel".
Action This Day, Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, editors. Bantam Press 2001. ISBN 0593 049101.
A collection of essays about Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
The most entertaining one is by the late John Chadwick.
This is how he describes his arrival in Heliopolis following the evacuation of Alexandria in 1942:
My arrival created administrative chaos, since I was a lone naval rating attached to an Army Intelligence Unit, itself attached to an RAF station.
He was later promoted "Temporary Sub-Lieutenant (Special Branch) RNVSR" because the material he handled was classed 'Officers Only'.
Later, after the Italian Armistice, he wanted to promote code discipline in the Aegean:
[...] I volunteered to go on the next mission to act as liaison with the Italian Navy in Leros, in the hope of preventing any further breaches of security. My suggestion was rejected, and I was told brutally that my superiors did not mind if I were killed, but they were unwilling to take the risk of my being taken prisoner.
Chadwick later deciphered Linear B along with Michael Ventris.
Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald.
An excellent history/reportage about Vietnam during the American War.
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War by Paul Fussell.
A blend of personal memoir, history, and literary criticism centering around WW2.
"(...) what time seems to have shown out later selves is that perhaps there was less coherent meaning in the events of wartime than we had hoped. Deprived of a satisfying final focus by both the enormousness of the war and the unmanageable copiousness of its verbal and visual residue, all the revisitor of this imagery can do, turning now this way, now that, is to indicate a few components of the scene. And despite the preponderance of vileness, not all are vile."
The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-1945 by Robin Niellands
A "fair and balanced" history of the Allied bombing campaigns during World War 2. A book similar to The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain by Stephen Bungay.
Niellands doesn't make any excuses for the Allied bombing. As he writes, there was a war on. And it is worth remembering that area bombing of civilians was initiated by the Germans, in Guernica, Warzaw, Coventry, and London. But the futility and horror of the bombing still remains. The point is not that area bombing was immoral. The war was immoral. But it still had to be fought.
Arthur Harris and his Command fought and died for the right of others to vilify their memory.
Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson.
A brilliant book about fighter pilots in France and England in the beginning of World War 2.
The First World War by John Keegan
A history of WWI.
The opening and closing chapters are eloquent in their condemnation of this horrible conflict, the defining event of the twentieth century. But the intervening ones are dry history, failing to convey the horror of the fighting.
For a novelist's view of the war, read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks.
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.
20 years in the future, IRC pals from the same timezones help each other out to try to further their Tribes way of life -- easygoing PST, hard-hitting EST, and stodgy, state-loving GMT. Each Tribe has agents in the other's territory, working in management consultancies, trying to undermine the enemy's competitiveness with hare-brained theories.
When our hero comes up with a great P2P scheme his friend and lover conspire to put him away in a mental hospital so that they don't have to share the profits.
Not as far "out there" as Down and out in the Magic Kingdom by the same author, but still a great read. Especially since it's free.
Damn Good Show by Derek Robinson
Goodbye Mickey Mouse by Len Deighton
Two very different books about the same period of time: the bomber war against Germany in World War 2.
In Damn Good Show, Derek Robinson writes about bombers, having written about fighters in Goshawk Squadron and A Good Clean Fight.. He brings to the story his trademark humour and nihilism. This time though, he doesn't kill off all his characters by the end, instead leaving a little ray of hope that some might come through the horrors of war and make a life on the other side.
Along the way, he debunks many myths about the wartime RAF, but doesn't subtract anything from the extraordinary courage that it took to bomb an enemy country in pitch-black, freezing planes.
Deighton's book is much more traditional view -- the cold, squalor, and fear experienced by the American pilots protecting the bombers in P-51:s is present, but somehow he doesn't convey as much realism as Robinson. The love story, although detailed, is banal. The characters are from central casting -- the brainy, handsome Eastener, the brash uncultured guy from New Mexico, the beautiful English girl who loves them both. Deighton fleshes them out, but they still look and feel like cardboard.
Goshawk Squadron by Derek Robinson.
This is Robinson's first book about war in the air. The dogfighting over France in 1918 is presented as just as bad as the fighting in the trenches. Powerful stuff.
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.
Re-reading this for the n-th time. The final episode of the film trilogy inspired me. I was pleased to find out that my internal movie was still the same. I was also impressed that Jackson was so faithful to the book.
Too bad the Swedish translation is so flawed. I would really like Leo to read this. He's old enough but his English's not good enough for the original. Viking will be old enough when the new translation is ready.