Title: Iron Council
Author: China Miéville
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0345464028
Pages: 564
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 23 December, 2007 - 5 January, 2008

Iron Council is Miéville's third novel set in the world of Bas-Lag, where thaumaturgy (magic) works along with steampunk technology and humans live alongside other sentient species.

Two decades ago, the city-state of New Crobuzon started building a railroad across an enormous desert. The workers are humans, cactacae (cactus people), and Remade (criminals grotesquely modified by thaumaturgy, with animal or mechanical parts grafted on). Eventually, they rebel against the heavy-handed overseers, and flee far into the badlands. Known as the Iron Council, their legend lives on in New Crobuzon.

By now, New Crobuzon is at war with the distant state of Tesh, but also wants to punish the Iron Council. Judah Low, a golemetrist who was part of the Iron Council, sets out from New Crobuzon to warn the Council. He is followed by his occasional lover, Cutter. Back in the city, Ori is a young radical fed up with endless talk who joins a revolutionary group that assassinates the city's ruler.

Miéville writes a very different kind of fantasy from the Tolkien-derived swords-and-sorcery that constitutes so much of the genre. His is a grim world where oppressive oligarchies use militias and sadistic thaumaturges to keep the masses under control. They live in Dickensian squalor in a city that sounds a little like London, with locations such as Dog Fenn, Kelltree, Brock Marsh, Sobex Croix, Petty Coil, Griss Twist, and Lich Sitting Station. Miéville is a Marxist and it shows. His writing is also marvelously evocative.

Recommended.

Today's odds and ends.

• George MacDonald Fraser died the other day. He was the author of the marvelous Flashman novels. I reviewed the last Flashman novel a year ago.

• Kiva seems like a really good idea, connecting people in the emerging world who need microloans with people who can afford to lend them $25.

  Last summer, we attended a house party for Marc Gold of the 100 Friends project. He's a sort of one-man Santa Claus, personally handing out money to needy people and organizations.

• Zane, whose superpower is knowing a Web 2.0 application for every problem, reminded me on Friday of Mint. I just signed up. Mint keeps track of your money across all your accounts and shows you your spending.

  I wanted to know how they make money, but it was hard to track down why it's free. They offer you suggestions on alternatives to your current banks, credit cards, phone companies, etc. If you switch, they get a little cut.

• Ian Welsh endorses Edwards and sums up why he thinks John Edwards is a better candidate than Clinton or Obama.

Herewith several articles that I've read lately for which I'm not going to write individual posts.

• Bruce Schneier has railed for years against security theater, ostensible security measures that have little real effect, but are performed to be seen as doing something — airline security being the most wretched example. Patrick Smith wrote a good piece on airport security follies at the NYT airline blog. We should all be protesting loudly at this nonsense, but no-one does because of the fear of ending up on a no-fly list.

• Also in the NYT, Harold McGee wrote a particularly interesting article on the hidden ingredient in cooking, heat.

  That’s the basic challenge: We’re often aiming a fire hose of heat at targets that can only absorb a slow trickle, and that will be ruined if they absorb a drop too much. ... No matter how efficient an appliance is, the cook can help simply by covering pots and pans with their lids.

  ... 

  Once a liquid starts to boil and is turning to steam throughout the pot — the bubbles of a boil are bubbles of water vapor — nearly all the energy from the burner is going into steam production. The temperature of the water itself remains steady at the boiling point, no matter how high the flame is underneath it. So turn the burner down. A gentle boil is just as hot as a furious one.

  ... 

  In fact it’s easy to save loads of time and energy and potential discomfort with grains, dry beans and lentils, and even pasta. But it requires a little thinking ahead. It turns out that the most time-consuming part of the process is not the movement of boiling heat to the center of each small bean or noodle, which takes only a few minutes, but the movement of moisture, which can take hours. Grains and dry legumes therefore cook much faster if they have been soaked. However heretical it may sound to soak dried pasta, doing so can cut its cooking time by two-thirds — and eliminates the problem of dry noodles getting stuck to each other as they slide into the pot.

• Obama stump speech strategy of conciliation considered harmful:

  Krugman has a problem with what Obama believes about the relationship between politics and economics. ... The bottom line (says Krugman): Politics drives economics, and not the other way round.

  ... 

  Obama presents himself as post-partisan, but partisan politics are needed. ...  So why on earth would Obama think that “tearing down” the Conservative Movement and “lifting this country up” are opposites? They’re the same! And we need the kind of politics that treats them that way. When the Swift Boat guys smeared Kerry, Kerry should have “torn them down.”

  Obama wants to “reach out,” but that strategy has already been tried. Obama says he wants to “reach out” to Republicans. But Reid and Pelosi “reached out” to Republicans, and that strategy was a miserable failure.

  [Read the rest at corrente.]

  I like Obama and I'll certainly throw my full support behind him, should he win the nomination, but Edwards' unabashed confrontationalism is more to my liking.

• Our military spending ($623 billion) is horrendous: more than the rest of the world put together ($500 billion) and ten times as much as the second biggest spender, China. All the leading candidates, both Republican and Democratic, favor expanding the military.

Title: The Terror
Author: Dan Simmons
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0316017450
Pages: 784
Keywords: historical, horror
Reading period: 27-31 December, 2007

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Canadian Arctic. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were never heard from again. Later rescuers found some notes in a cairn, indicating that the ships had been trapped for a year and a half in the ice, and the crews had finally abandoned ship, making for the south.

Dan Simmons builds a tale of horror from all the known historical facts: the frigid dangers of an Arctic winter, when the sun doesn't rise for months; the ice constantly grinding the trapped ships; the terrible hardships of man-hauling sleds across the ice packs; the hunger as the food runs out early as many of the cans were improperly sealed; and the horrors of scurvy as they begin starving. The final horror is a beast from Inuit legend, which terrorizes them for months, picking them off one by one.

The book is told from the viewpoints of multiple characters on the two ships, most notably that of Francis Crozier, the captain of the Terror, a hard-drinking, socially inferior Irish commoner, who is far more capable than the inept Sir John. Despite the horrors, these men refuse to simply give up. They go on, sustaining hope, under the most awful conditions.

Recommended, though it would have been a better book were it shorter.

Via Hullabaloo, a description of waterboarding from someone who tried it on himself:

It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here's what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vacuum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it's all over. No question.

Some may go easy without a rag, some may need a rag, some may need saran wrap.

Once you are there it's all over.

I didn't allow anybody else to try it on me. Inconceivable. I know I only got the barest taste of what it's about since I was in control, and not restrained and controlling the flow of water.

But there's no chance. No chance at all.

So, is it torture?

I'll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question.

It's horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I'd give up anything, say anything, do anything.

The Spanish Inquisition knew this. It was one of their favorite methods.

It's torture. No question. Terrible terrible torture. To experience it and understand it and then do it to another human being is to leave the realm of sanity and humanity forever. No question in my mind.

Wikipedia has a long article on waterboarding.

Title: The Boy-Bishop's Glovemaker
Author: Michael Jecks
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Headline
Copyright: 2000
ISBN: 0747266115
Pages: 331
Keywords: mystery, historical
Reading period: 20-22 December, 2007

Days before Christmas 1321, a glovemaker is murdered in the cathedral town of Exeter. Sir Baldwin and his friend, Simon Puttock, are asked to investigate by the Dean of the Cathedral.

Jecks juggles a complex plot with a large cast of characters, and manages to keep them distinct and interesting, while describing the intersection of cathedral and town life and Christmas rituals in medieval England.

Title: Unnatural Selection
Author: Aaron Elkins
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0425216055
Pages: 264
Keywords: crime
Reading period: 17-19 December, 2007

Gideon Oliver, the forensic anthropologist saddled with the unfortunate nickname of the "Skeleton Detective" by the press, is on vacation in the Scilly Isles, with his wife Julie. She's participating in a small biennial colloquium organized by an eccentric Russian millionaire.

Naturally, he happens upon a bone fragment, which leads him to a dismembered corpse, who turns out to be an attendee of the previous colloquium.

The main characters are likeable and, despite the somewhat gruesome descriptions of skeletons and postmortems, it's an enjoyable, well-plotted whodunnit.

Title: The Fourth Bear
Author: Jasper Fforde
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Viking Penguin
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0670037729
Pages: 382
Keywords: humor, crime
Reading period: 16-17 December, 2007

DCI Jack Spratt runs the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading, Berks police. Investigative reporter Goldilocks is found dead, after last being seen at the three bears' house. The Gingerbreadman, a 7-foot psychopathic cake, is rampaging around, randomly killing people. Punch and Judy have moved in next door: when they're not beating each other up, they're very good marriage counsellors. And enormous cucumbers are exploding under mysterious circumstances.

An extremely bizarre story, replete with puns, nursery rhymes, literary allusions, and shaggy dog stories.

Entertaining, if silly.

Title: Triggerfish Twist
Author: Tim Dorsey
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Torch
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 0061031550
Pages: 372
Keywords: humor, crime
Reading period: 16 December, 2007

Another book featuring Serge A. Storms, the almost-likable serial killer and amateur historian of Florida.

Serge, his coke-addict, stripper girlfriend, Sharon, and his stoner sidekick, Coleman, rent a house on Triggerfish Lane, Tampa. Their landlord is trying to drive out the few remaining homeowners on the block, so that he can bulldoze it for condos.

It's quite the neighborhood. a former millionaire who likes to test-drive expensive cars; the psychotic Little League coach with a pit bull; the student party house; the South American death squad guy in hiding; and Jim Davenport, a business consultant who gets fired by the new management for being too honest.

Add Serge and his coterie, various bad guys, random acts of stupidity and caprice, and stir, then watch the mayhem.

Entertaining and more coherent than the last book that I read by Dorsey.

Title: The Best American Crime Writing 2005
Author: Otto Penzler (editor), Thomas H. Cook (editor)
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 0060815515
Pages: 384
Keywords: non-fiction, crime
Reading period: 9-16 December, 2007

Female sex slaves, Ukrainian oligarchs, an obsessive silver thief, white-collar criminals facing jail time, virus writers, self-destructive surgeons, and the Madrid bombers, are just some of the stories in this collection of non-fiction writing on crime and criminals, published in various magazines in 2005.

The book is bracketed by two pieces by James Ellroy. In the foreword, he argues that "true-crime writing offers a less kineticized and more sobering set of thrills [than crime fiction]—chiefly couched in human revelation". In the concluding essay, he pays homage to Joseph Wambaugh, whose writing inspired him to become a writer himself.

The other pieces are gripping articles, ranging from the picayune—human trackers following a tiny fraction of the illegal immigrants crossing a remote stretch of the Rio Grande—to billion-dollar Ponzi schemes.

Recommended.

Title: The Naming of the Dead
Author: Ian Rankin
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0316057576
Pages: 464
Keywords: crime, fiction
Reading period: 8-9 December, 2007

The G8 conference is about to open in Gleneagles, Scotland, during the first week of July 2005. Hundreds of thousands of anti-globalization activists are heading to Edinburgh to protest.

Edinburgh cop, DI John Rebus, is about the only police officer in Britain who's not on G8 duty. He's been sidelined because of his propensity for pissing off his superiors. Instead, he gets involved in two different investigations.

A Labour MP plunged to his death from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. Suicide or murder? Why does Rebus keep getting the runaround from Special Branch? A serial killer has murdered three convicted rapists: cases that were not previously tied together because the police thought the dead men got what they deserved.

Rebus and his partner, DS Siobhan Clarke, are prickly, stubborn cops, morally compromised by the tacit agreements they make with men with power, and struggling to wipe away the stains by fighting on behalf of the dead. The background of the G8 leads to an extraordinary week in Edinburgh. The disparities between the powerful and the powerless are acutely apparent.

A strong novel, but weakened by the conclusion, where the two cases are implausibly tied together.

Title: Skeletons
Author: Kate Wilhelm
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Mira
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 1551667495
Pages: 378
Keywords: thriller
Reading period: 8 December, 2007

Lee Donne agrees to housesit for her absent-minded grandfather. Soon, someone is trying to scare her out of the house in Eugene, Oregon. Buried deep in the house, she discovers why: old photos of young men lynching a black man. One of those men is now running for President as a third-party candidate.

Lee goes on the run and takes her story to a newspaper. She decides to hide in plain sight, à la The Purloined Letter, and heads to New Orleans, posing as a newspaper photographer.

Fairly entertaining and intelligent thriller.

Title: Hogfather
Author: Terry Pratchett
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 1996
ISBN: 0061059056
Pages: 384
Keywords: humor, fantasy
Reading period: 2-7 December, 2007

Last week, we watched the TV adaptation of Hogfather, which got me to re-read the book. The book is a lot funnier. Pratchett's written descriptions don't translate very well to the screen.

The Hogfather is the Discworld's equivalent of Santa Claus: a large, jolly fat man who delivers presents to children on the longest night of the year. The Auditors, celestial bureaucrats who take a dim view of the messiness of human existence, decide to have the Hogfather killed. Death takes it upon himself to deliver the presents to children instead, while setting his granddaughter Susan on the trail of the assassin responsible for the chaos.

One of the better Discworld novels. Pratchett entertains us with his characteristic humor, while ruminating on the human condition, notably the nature of belief.

Recommended.

Title: The Historian
Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 0316154547
Pages: 642
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 25 November-2 December, 2007

For centuries, carefully selected historians have mysteriously received a book that contains only a picture of a dragon holding a placard that says, Drakulya. Three generations of one family have followed the trail of those books: the narrator as a teenager in the 1970s, her graduate student parents in the 1950s, and her mother's father in the 1930s.

The trail has led them from the Pyrenees to the Balkans and Istanbul, from libraries to monasteries to remote mountain villages. The narrative moves back and forth across the three generations, as each retraces their predecessors' footsteps. Each of them find fragments of evidence that show that Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia and scourge of the invading Ottomans, never died but lives on.

The author weaves a historical mystery against a backdrop of Cold War Eastern Europe and the late Middle Ages, and the never-ending clash between Christianity and Islam. The tension builds as each generation makes its inevitable way towards a confrontation with Dracula late in the book.

Well-written and attention-holding.

Title: Coyote Dreams
Author: C.E. Murphy
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Luna
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 0373802722
Pages: 408
Keywords: fantasy
Reading period: 25 November, 2007

Third in the Walker Papers series of urban fantasies.

Joanne Walker discovered six months ago that she's a powerful shaman, and she's not happy about it. She's an officer in the Seattle Police Department and a former mechanic, and being a woo-woo shaman does not fit with her self image. She's contrary and stubborn and her determination not to accept her new state leads to big problems.

The people that she's close to are going into comas. In her blundering ignorance when she first came into her powers, she unwittingly awakened an ancient power that wants to bring the world to an end. Joanne has to start accepting her shamanism if she's ever going to save her friends.

Meanwhile, the new boyfriend who seems too good to be true is too good to be true. And her love-hate relationship with her boss, Captain Morrison, becomes even more complicated.

Entertaining.

Title: Folly
Author: Laurie R. King
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: 2001
ISBN: 0007111347
Pages: 400
Keywords: fiction, suspense
Reading period: 22-24 November, 2007

Rae Newborn has struggled with depression for decades. The death a year ago of her second husband and their young daughter drove her to attempt suicide. Now she's moved to Folly, a small island in the San Juans that she inherited from Desmond Newborn, her grandfather's brother.

Desmond went off to the First World War and came back broken by shell shock. He bought Folly in the 1920s and built a house with his own hands, then disappeared after the house burned down.

All alone on Folly, Rae starts rebuilding the house and finds herself retracing the events of Desmond's life. The parallels become stronger when she finds his skeleton in a cave and reads his journal.

As we learn her story, we find that she has reason to be fearful. It's not just in her head; there really is someone out to hurt her. The construction is therapeutic: as she rebuilds the house, she begins to rebuild her life. She starts to repair the relationship with her long-estranged elder daughter and draws closer to her beloved granddaughter.

The ending was a little too neat and pat for my liking, but otherwise I greatly enjoyed this book.

Title: Wilt in Nowhere
Author: Tom Sharpe
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Publisher: Arrow
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0099481731
Pages: 278
Keywords: humor, satire
Reading period: 19-21 November, 2007

In the Seventies and Eighties, Tom Sharpe was a bestselling author in Britain, pumping out a dozen hilarious satires, marked by their savagery. His particular targets were apartheid, the British class system, and political correctness. Then he dried up, producing only three books in the last twenty years.

Wilt in Nowhere is his fourth book about Henry Wilt, a lecturer at a third-rate community college, married to the formidable Eva and father of four ghastly quadruplets. Eva takes the girls to America to stay with her rich uncle in Tennessee. Henry goes on a walking tour of England. He inadvertently gets caught up in a case of arson, while she somehow becomes the focus of a narcotics investigation.

This is fairly funny, but nowhere near as good as I remember his earlier books.

Title: 1634: The Baltic War
Author: David Weber, Eric Flint
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 141652102X
Pages: 728
Keywords: alternate history
Reading period: 18 November, 2007

The latest book from the 1632 series; this one is the long awaited sequel to 1633. The premise of the series is that through some mysterious alien event, a small West Virginian town is sent back to Germany in 1631, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, utterly changing the course of history. The Americans ally themselves with King Gustav Adolf of Sweden, forming the United States of Europe.

The authors adeptly juggle a series of plots that were set in motion in the earlier book. The town of Luebeck is besieged by the French and the Danes. A diplomatic party has to be broken out of the Tower of London. The American-built "ironside" battle ships have to float down the Elbe and sail into the Baltic. The power of the Spanish in the Netherlands has to be broken.

One of the better books in the series. The authors have fun exploring the ramifications of such a world-changing event as the effects continue to ripple through Early Modern Europe.

Title: What Came Before He Shot Her
Author: Elizabeth George
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0060545631
Pages: 722
Keywords: fiction, mystery
Reading period: 11-17 November, 2007

In Elizabeth George's previous book, With No One As Witness, a senior police officer's pregnant wife is gunned down in London by a 12-year-old boy in an apparently random act. This book tells the story of how that shooting came to happen.

The three Campbell children are abandoned on their aunt's doorstep by their feckless grandmother, months before the shooting. They are mixed-race children with deep-seated damage: their alcoholic father was killed in front of them a few years ago and their mother has long been in a mental hospital. Ness, 15, is deeply alienated and truant, and quickly becomes a drug dealer's girlfriend. Toby, 7, is mildly retarded and attracts bullies. Well-meaning, eleven-year-old Joel is his brother's protector. Their Aunt Kendra is wholly unprepared, emotionally or logistically, to become a mother to these troubled children.

Joel, Ness, and Kendra all proceed towards tragedy, through a combination of bad choices, poor options, inadequate coping skills, grevious miscommunication, and events that are beyond their control.

George paints an unsettling picture of a family at the edge. Each of the principals is strongly drawn, each one's actions makes sense of a sort, each one's demons compels them to fuck up. We know that ultimately Joel will kill a woman and we watch despairingly as he makes the choices that box him in to his destiny.

Not easy reading, but compelling.

Title: Paula Spencer
Author: Roddy Doyle
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Publisher: Viking
Copyright: 2006
ISBN: 0670038164
Pages: 288
Keywords: fiction
Reading period: 2-11 November, 2007

Roddy Doyle has visited Paula Spencer twice before. First in The Family, a BBC TV serial; then in The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Ten years on from the last book, Paula is a recovering alcoholic who only recently crawled out of the bottle. The boom years of the Celtic Tiger have passed her by: Paula continues to clean Dublin offices and houses for a living. Her youngest two children are still at home. Jack is fine but Leanne is heading towards alcoholism herself. Her other son, John Paul, is estranged and a former heroin junkie, and her oldest, Nicola, worries about her.

Paula is pulling herself together, but it's not easy. She is emotionally volatile and insecure, afraid of being rejected by her children, and sometimes only a hairsbreadth away from taking another drink. But she hasn't lost her sense of humor. She's a sympathetic character, not a whinger.

This is vintage Roddy Doyle and it's both very funny and emotionally true, an unsparing but affectionate portrait of a flawed heroine.

Recommended.