The Origins of the War of 1914 is a three-volume diplomatic history, originally written in the 1920s and 1930s and published in the 1940s. Volume I covers the years 1884 through 1914. Volume II covers June 28 through July 31.
It's a 700 page account that sometimes goes hour by hour, but ultimately it's a fairly simple story, and mostly one of tragic blunders. Austria-Hungary, with Germany's blessing, deliberately started a war to crush Serbia, but nobody wanted the disastrous war that happened. Germany and Austria-Hungary mistakenly believed that “localization of the conflict,” meaning an Austro-Serbian war with all other Great Powers remaining neutral, was feasible and even likely. Partly this is because they mistakenly believed that Italy would be an ally if it came to war and Britain would be neutral, which in turn would cause Russia and France to back down without a war.
There were serious blunders on all sides, including the failure of Italian and British diplomats to make their countries' positions clear, and including the fact that none of the diplomats understood what mobilization really meant. What really astonishes me, though, is the last days of July, when it was finally becoming clear to every government that they were falling toward a general European war and that the only thing that could possibly stop it would be real compromises from Russia and Austria-Hungary. In neither country did the political leaders stop and ask themselves whether their country could survive a war. In the end, neither did.
The first of the Ile-Rien books, and Martha Wells's first novel, originally published in 1993. I read a revised edition from 2006.
Huck Finn is one of a few books that has a pretty good claim to be The Great American Novel. Among other things it's probably the origin of the American novel structured as a road trip. It's also a book with an unreliable narrator in an interesting sense. Huck Finn was published in 1884 and set 30 or 40 years earlier. The main character, raised in a society where a great evil is treated as normal, begins to learn to do what's right — but that's not how he descibes it, because he lacks the language to say that it's the rest of the white world around him that's wrong.
“All right, then, I'll go to hell”—and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think of anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
A biography of Harry Lafler (1878–1935), a Bay Area poet, journalist, literary magazine editor, and also, incongrously, a real estate advertizing man, industrial property broker, and pillar of the East Bay business community. He was once at the center of the San Francisco literary bohemian community, the social circles that included people like George Sterling, Nora May French, Jack London, Mary Hunter Austin, Robinson Jeffers, and Clark Ashton Smith. One of the minor characters in Jack London's The Valley of the Moon, “Hafler the poet,” is obviously based on him.
Harry Lafler was a prominent public figure for many years in San Francisco, Big Sur, Oakland, and Los Angeles. His marriages and divorces made the news, and his untimely death in a car crash made the front page of the Oakland Tribune. These days his best known work is probably his reporting from the 1906 earthquake, including his piece “My Sixty Sleepless Hours.” There's a well known photograph of him sitting in the rubble with his typewriter, perhaps working on a draft of that article. It's the cover photo for The King of Telegraph Hill.
The author, Joanne Lafler, was Harry Lafler's daughter-in-law, although she never met him: her future husband was a small child when Harry died. She was also my mother-in-law. This is her last book, published posthumously.
Michael Chabon's first novel, published in 1988, telling the story of a graduating Pitt senior and his very weird summer. It's not dated very precisely, but probably it's set in the late 70s or early 80s: before the AIDS epidemic, but not much before. Parts of it reminded me of The Great Gatsby, which was probably deliberate.
The Cloud Factory, in case you're curious, is the Bellefield Boiler Plant.
“Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the foresaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
“How shall a man judge what to do in such times?”
“As he ever has judged,” said Aragorn. “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”
A standalone novel, not part of any of Wodehouse's series, although some of the places and minor characters make it clear that it's set in the same world as the Wooster and Blandings books. It's very silly, as one would hope.
The title, Cocktail Time, comes from a book within the book that most of the plot is centered on: a scandalous and salacious satire against modern youth that becomes a best-seller after it's denounced from the pulpit.
“It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope.”
Not a Maisie Dobbs novel. There are a couple of scenes where one might have imagined Maisie appearing in a brief cameo, but it didn't happen. It's a historical novel, beginning in London in June 1914 and ending in rural Kent in March 1915. It focuses on two young women: Kezia, a schoolteacher and soon to be a farmer's wife, and Thea, her best friend and sister-in-law to be, a suffragist and pacifist. Kezia's new husband, of course, ends up in the trenches in France.
Third and last book of The Final Architecture. Most of the mysteries get answers, including why the Architects behave as they do and who the Originators were, and some of the answers are even ones that humans can understand.
My two favorite parts were the Hannilambra lifecycle, and the role in Essiel society (to the limited extent that humans understand it) of someone like The Unspeakable Aklu, the Razor and the Hook.
Sequel to Shards of Earth. The Architects have returned, and the various human and non-human factions are far from united. Tensions between the Colonies and the Parthenon have been rising, and all it'll take for them to turn into all-out war is one murdered archduke or the equivalent.
The damsel in question is Lady Maud Marsh, daughter of the Earl of Marshmoreton. This is a relatively early novel, published 1919, and it's a standalone rather than a book with any of Wodehouse's recurring characters.
Apparently there's a 1937 film musical of it, with a screenplay by Wodehouse, music and lyrics by the Gershwins, and a great cast. I ought to see it!
I've read a few of Murakami's short pieces in The New Yorker, but this is the first of his novels that I've read. I'll have to read more. I'll also probably have to reread The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It's complicated structurally and it blurs the distinction between the real and the fantastic, and between the literal and the symbolic — as several of the characters realize.
From today it's doubly a historical novel, partly about Japan in the early 1980s and partly about the fall of Manchukuo. It's also partly about a lost cat.
First book of The Final Architecture series: science fiction on the grand scale. Yes, as the title suggests, it takes place after Earth is destroyed. More specifically it takes place some decades after the end of the war (if that's the right word) with the unimaginably powerful and incomprehensible entities that humans and their allies call Architects. The Architects might not be quite as gone as people hope.
A collection of short fiction. Most of it is unrelated to previously published work but it does include the original novella-length version of “Spinning Silver,” a story set a year or two after the end of The Golden Enclaves, one set a couple thousand years before the beginning of His Majesty's Dragon, and a Temeraire / Pride and Prejudice crossover.
The main character in the story set in the distant past of Temeraire's world is Marcus Antonius. Apparently the characterization of him is based on Plutarch's version, which I haven't read yet. I ought to.
The first English language collection of Borges's works, originally published in 1962, edited by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates and translated by several people. The pieces in it come from several of Borges's books, mostly Ficciones, El Aleph, Otras inquisiciones, and El Hacedor. It includes some of Borges's most famous works, including “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “The Library of Babel,” and “Funes the Memorious.”
Borges was one of the great writers of the 20th century, and this is a good introduction to his work. I was trying to explain to a coworker why I liked Borges so much, and probably didn't do a good job of it. Borges is erudite, intellectually playful, and philosophically deep; the best of his stories (if one should call them stories) stay with you and sometimes change the way you think. I'm also reminded of a quote from “Three Versions of Judas.” Describing a fictional writer, Borges writes:
It is necessary to repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National Evangelical Union, was deeply religious. In the intellectual circles of Paris or even of Buenos Aires, a man of letters might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; these theses, set forth in such circles, would be frivolous and useless exercises in negligence or blasphemy. For Runeberg, they were the key to one of the central mysteries of theology; they were the subject of meditation and analysis, of historical and philological controversy, of pride, of jubilation and of terror.
In Borges's case it's not a matter of religion, but one might say something similar. He had a taste for paradox, infinities, esoterica, and the unexpected, but it was never just about frivolity. The ideas he played with mattered to him.
Len Deighton is one of the classic authors of Cold War era spy novels. This is the first one I've read, so I don't know whether it's typical of his work. It was published in 1976 and it has the many of the things I'd expect, like uncertain loyalties, moral ambiguity, lies, and violence. It also includes SETI, although I don't think that's the term that was used back then.
I reread it before going to the adaptation at San Francisco Opera.
The last Maisie Dobbs novel. The first few books in the series take place in the teens and twenties and focus on the aftermath of the Great War, in which Maisie herself served as a nurse. This book begins in October 1945, and focuses on the aftermath of WWII.
The book begins with a young physicist, who's consumed by guilt for the obvious reason given the date; it takes a long time before we return to him.
Sequel to She Who Became the Sun, the second book of a historical fantasy duology about the Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty. It's slightly supernatural and more than slightly LGBT. I should probably read up on the actual history someday, to get some idea of which parts were real and which were fictional.
A classic time travel story, and one of the best, originally published in 1973. I read a revised edition from 2003. I don't know how extensive the updates were; the most obvious is that the book mentions the events of September 11 2001.
A science fiction book that deservedly got a lot of attention when it was published in 2021; this is my first time reading it. It has a complicated and ambitious structure with three braided timelines: one in 1012 in the city-state of Tzoyna in what's now Belize, one in Minnesota and Belize in 2012, and one in various parts of the world, including Belize, in 3012. There are connections between the three timelines, most obviously the fact that characters in the later sections remember the earlier ones as historical or semi-legendary figures. There are also thematic parallels, including the tension between cultural evolution and preservation, and other parallels that become clearer later in the book. Mayan religion is important in all three.
Like a lot of people, the part I liked the best was the far future world of 3012: the new way of life or philosophy or religion (the categories mean different things to them than to us) of Laviaja that evolved after the climate disasters of the 21st through 23rd centuries. A number of characters unironically describe their world as a utopia, which seems entirely fair, but I'm also sympathetic to the character who says, on the very first page of the novel, that society needs to rethink fundamental principles and that a new age needs new beliefs and practices. I imagine most readers will have similar feelings.
Four different narratives about a fictional early 20th century Wall Street tycoon. The first, disorientingly, is a novel within a novel, presenting a fictionalized but recognizable version of the characters we encounter later in differently distanced forms.
“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
I’m sure that Beatrice and Benedick will have a happy and lively marriage, but I’m not so sure about Claudio and Hero.
The schemes in question include Soviet collective farming, planned cities like Brasília inspired by the visions of Le Corbusier and his followers, Tanzanian villagization, and arguably American agribusiness. The book's premise is stated explicitly several times, both early in the book and late, including this passage in chapter 3:
I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this aspiration. As a faith, it was shared by many across a wide spectrum of political ideologies. … The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.
This book is in large part an exploration of three terms: high-modernism, legibility, and mētis. I don't know if Scott invented any of those terms in the sense that he uses them, but the exploration is still extremely valuable. I appreciated the many examples early in the book of how governments, especially from the early modern era on, increased state capacity not just by building more efficient bureaucracies, but by reordering society in such a way that a government can see and manage it: establishing uniform measures, simplifying property law, regularizing boundaries, assigning family names. My own family name is almost certainly from one of the projects to improve state legibility that Scott mentions: the 1787 Austrian law, part of the emancipation program, requiring Jewish subjects to choose last names.
Parts of this book reminded me of Borges. The idea of simplifying society for the purpose of state legibility, especially, reminded me of the observation toward the end of Funes the Memorious that Funes, with his extraordinary memory for specificity, was scarcely capable of thought: “To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.” I don't know if Scott was thinking of that particular story, but he was certainly thinking about Borges: one of the chapter epigraphs is taken from Borges's On Exactitude in Science. (Although credited, slyly, to the fictional author Borges is supposedly quoting from.)
I'm not completely sure that Scott's notion of mētis is a coherent category; I think he uses the term in at least three ways, and I'm not as convinced as he is that they mean the same thing. I'll have to think more about it, but it's a valuable book regardless.
This volume was all about wine and cheese pairings. The competition included Époisses paired with a Haute-Molière Beaujolais Nouveau, Pont-l'Évêque paired with an aged San Isidro Gran Reserva, and 18 month Comté paired with a 1986 Robert Chevillon Nuits-St-Georges.
A tragedy about a noble Roman destroyed by his pride, based on Plutarch's Life of Caius Marcius Coriolanus. I haven't read Plutarch's version of the story, but at least in Shakespeare's version I wouldn't exactly say that the main character's fault is pride, even though that's what everyone in the play calls it — I'd say his problem is partly that he's unlikeable and impulsive, and partly that he's politically naive and he's unfortunate enough to have enemies who are better at politics than he is.
A machine learning textbook by some of the stars of the field, written at an advanced undergrad or graduate level. One of the things I appreciated about it is that it explains clearly which parts of the field are the result of principled mathematical derivation based on things like Bayesian probability, which of them are semi-rigorous approximations or heuristics that you can at least justify with a suggestive argument, and which are poorly understood but just seem to work in practice. I found surprising things in all three categories! Some seemingly arbitrary things, like dropout layers, are better grounded than I would have guessed.
Deep Learning was published in 2016 and Attention Is All You Need came out in 2017, so it doesn't discuss transformer models. It does discuss some of the important idea that led up to transformers, including embeddings, autoencoders, the attention mechanism, and LSTM models.
The text of the book, and other resources like exercises and lecture notes, is available on the book website, www.deeplearningbook.org.
A very atypical Nero Wolfe mystery. We learn who the villain is on the second or third page, although he never appears as a character in the novel: J. Edgar Hoover. The precipitating event for the story is publication of the real-world 1964 expose by the investigative journalist Fred J. Cook, The F.B.I. Nobody Knows.
An art book, not a novel. It's physically very large, about 10×14 inches, and consists of very faithful facsimile reproductions of the notebooks that Iain Banks kept while writing the Culture novels, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s. It has a brief introduction by his widow Adele, a note on production, and a few quotes from Banks to provide context for each section, but mostly it's just the drawings themselves: maps, ships (including the Xenophobe from Use of Weapons and the Limiting Factor from The Player of Games), drones, Orbitals, weapons, the written Marain language, lots of numbers and statistics. One gets the sense that these drawings mostly weren't intended as art, but as Banks working his thoughts out on paper.
I accompanied the book with a 10 year old Springbank. I hope it's a dram that Iain Banks would have approved of.
The title makes it sound like it's a book about Maureen, but no, it's more a book by her: a collection of some of the many works of SF criticism she wrote over the decades, collected posthumously. One of the nominees for the 2024 Best Related Work Hugo.
Just what the title sounds like: a collection of previously published science fiction reviews, mostly from a decade or so ago. One of the nominees for the 2024 Hugo in the Best Related Work category.
Unlike getting to the end of My Favorite Thing is Monsters: Book One and only noticing the “Book One” part when getting to the end, the full two-book My Favorite Thing is Monsters does actully feel like a complete story. It's a very open ended story, though; by no means all of the mysteries and secrets are fully explained.
After seven years, Book Two is out! My Favorite Thing is Monsters was always intended as a single book, just one that would have been far too large to bind as a single volume. It's been a long time since I read Book One and I'd forgotten a lot, so I reread it in preparation for Book Two. Yes, it's as good as I'd remembered, and the art style is like no other graphic novel I'd seen before. The monsters feel deeply personal. They're partly a metaphor and partly a source of comfort. The main character loves monster movies and monster comics, and draws herself as a monster; monsters and art make more sense than the other things in her life, like growing up lesbian and mixed-race in working-class 1960s Chicago, or the violent death of her beautiful neighbor Anka Silverberg, a Holocaust survivor, or the doings of their other neighbor, a gangster boss, or the threat that her brother might be sent to Vietnam, or her mother's cancer, or her absent father, or all the secrets her family is keeping from her.
The second Tommy and Tuppence book: partly a spy thriller, partly a parody of detective stories, originally published as a series of short stories between 1923 and 1929. For spy reasons, Tommy and Tuppence temporarily take over a detective agency, and they try to solve the cases by cosplaying as their favorite fictional detectives, including Holmes, Thorndyke, Poirot, and Father Brown. Also including many I'd never heard of before. It's a funny book, although I'm sure I'd have found it even funnier if I'd read more of what the main characters call the classics.
The book makes common use of an uncommon word: curser. Cursers, in the country where the book takes place, are those rare people who are sufficiently consumed by rage and hatred that they're able to cast a curse. The titular unraveller, Kellen, possesses the possibly unique ability of sometimes, with enough work and understanding, being able to unravel a curse (or other things). Naturally he finds himself involved in a complicated conspiracy, where it's not at all clear whom to believe and which of the powerful people with hidden agendas are in the right, and naturally he winds up getting cursed himself.
The other locals at the inn will be happy to answer some of your question. Do cursers really exist? (Yes.) Can curses really set someone on fire, steal their shadow or turn them into a swarm of bees? (Yes.) Is it true that the power to curse comes from spiders? (No, the Little Brothers are not spiders, however much they look like them.)
One of the finalists for the 2024 Lodestar.
It's the same booksellers as in the first book of the duology: the St. Jacques clan, some sinister and some dextrous. They have outposts in various cities, including a small bookshop in Bath, mostly there so they can keep watch on Sulis Minerva, the Ancient Sovereign of the Roman Baths.
One of the finalists for the 2024 Lodestar.
YA historical fantasy, set in England in 1983. Yes, the titular booksellers really are booksellers, with two London bookshops. Secretly they're also hereditary guardians, watching for incursions by malign old powers. The left- and right-handedness have mystical significance.
The main character is a young woman from the country, come to London to attend art school and find her father, whose name she never knew. She's thrown into the bewildering world of booksellers and magical threats, apparently by accident, but it doesn't take long for it to become clear that there's more to her background than she had realized.
One of the nominees for the 2024 Best Novella Hugo, first published in English in the anthology Adventures in Space (Short stories by Chinese and English Science Fiction writers). Parts of it read to me like a response to Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem and sequels, although possibly that's an illusion caused by the fact that I've read so little Chinese science fiction. For all I know, maybe these themes are and have been common, and I'm just associating them with Liu because that's who I've read.
I didn't like Life Does Not Allow Us to Meet very much: I found it infodump-heavy, disjointed, and clumsily written. Either my taste is very different from that of Chinese science fiction fans and editors, or else the translator did this novella a disservice.
It begins in the mid 21st century when a businessman receives an unexpected inheritance from an aunt he barely knew, and it soon becomes obvious that it's less about money than about science, specifically about nanotechnology and artificial life. One of the nominees for the 2024 Best Novella Hugo. I'm afraid I found it pretty dry and didactic.
The front matter begins with an unfamiliar version of the periodic table and an unfamiliar map of the world: the shapes of the continents are the ones we're used to but the names are different, ones like Tyskland and Norsland and Kindah. This book takes place in what we would call New England. What it's called in the story depends on whom you ask. The main character, a fifteen year old girl named Anequs, would say that she's from the island of Masquapaug. The Anglish, on the other hand, call it Mask, part of Lindmarden, under the rule of Jarl Leiknir Joersarsson and ultimately the high king.
The book begins when Anequs sees a dragon, the first indigenous dragon that anyone on Masquapaug has seen in generations, and later finds the dragon's egg. Naturally the hatchling chooses Anequs as companion, and naturally, partly because of Anglish law and partly becuase nobody on Masquapaug still knows the things Anequs needs to learn to be a dragon's Nampeshiweisit, Anequs heads off to a boarding school in Vastergot where she can learn essential subjects like al-jabr, anglereckoning, skiltakraft, and dragon husbandry. Not everyone in the school, or in Vastergot, is happy to see her there, and even the well-meaning ones see her as an unfortunate primitive who ought to be pleased to learn how to belong to the civilized world.
This book is in part about heavy issues involving power, inequality, dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the rise of fascism, but parts of it are just about having a fun invented world. As with Poul Anderson's “Uncleftish Beholding,” it's fun seeing an alternate history where most of the technical language comes from Germanic roots rather than Latin ones.
YA fantasy, and one of the finalists for the 2024 Lodestar. It's obviously the first book of a planned series.
A mystery story: a University don has disappeared in circumstances that strongly suggest suicide, but there's no body and there's no explanation for why he would have done any such thing. The story is set in humanity's home in exile after Earth has become uninhabitable, the rings and platforms high up in the Jovian atmosphere. The setting is constructed to give it a strong late-Victorian vibe, with gaslamps, telegrams instead of cellphones, and lots of traincars. This is only fitting, since the two main characters are obviously inspired by Holmes and Watson.
It's a fun story, and one of the finalists for the 2024 Best Novella Hugo, but you definitely have to suspend your disbelief about the setting and the premise. Building solid metal rings around Jupiter? Really? And even more important: no matter how thoroughly we wreck Earth, it's very hard to believe we could do anything to this planet that would make the Moon or Mars or Jupiter look welcoming by comparison.
An alternative version of the Sleeping Beauty story. The author describes it as a sweet story and expects that people will find that surprising given some of the very not-sweet events in it, but she's right. One of the finalists for the 2024 Best Novella Hugo.
YA fantasy, one of the finalists for the 2024 Lodestar award, set in some unspecified time and place in Africa. Parts of it are reminiscent of familiar European fairy tales, others less so. It's similar to one of the author's other books, Ring Shout, in that it gives us a different view of real evils from our world by envisioning them as supernatural evils.
The sequel, Abeni and the Kingdom of Gold, is scheduled for next year. I don't know if the author is planning a duology or something longer.
Mammoths from the mammoth corps at the gates of Singing Hills Abbey, that is, where Cleric Chih has temporarily returned home from their travels. Not an attack, probably, but certainly a confrontation of sorts, involving the death of a senior cleric and multiple stories from and about their life.
“Why are we talking to tigers?” asked Si-Yu.
“Because they are talking to us,” Chih said, stifling a somewhat hysterical giggle. “They can talk, and now they've seen that we can. That's—that means that they'll treat us like people.”
“But there's still a chance that they're going to eat us.”
“Oh yes. Some people are just more… edible than others if you are a tiger.”
The subtitle is Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? Not exactly a spoiler: the answer is no. It's an informative book, including some of the obvious questions like orbital mechanics, space babies (not a good idea, although we don't yet know exactly how bad an idea it is), and where the water comes from, and some of the less obvious questions like international law.
If you're like most of the nonexperts we talked to as we researched this book, you might have some ideas about space settlement that aren't quite right. We don't blame you—the public discourse around space settlement is full of myths, fantasies, and outright misunderstandings of basic facts.
Informative and entertaining, and yes, I'm convinced that we're not going to have a city on Mars any time soon. The cover has blurbs from people like James S. A. Corey, Andy Weir, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Mary Roach, and it deserves them.
A short and largely nontechnical book. The focus, as the title suggests, is dispelling widely believed misconceptions about quantum computers. Chapter titles include “Myth 1: Nobody Understands This Quantum Stuff,” “Myth 3: Quantum Computers Try All Solutions At Once,” and “Myth 7: Quantum Computing Is Impossible.”
One of the Best Novel finalists for the 2024 Hugo, a historical fantasy set in the 12th century in Aden, Mogadishu, Socotra, and other points in and around the Indian Ocean. It's the adventures of Amina al-Sirafi late in her life. In her youth Amina was one of the most notorious pirate captains of her age, she retired years ago and started a quiet and anonymous and more or less law abiding life raising her daughter, and a rich noblewoman tracks her down and persuades her to come out of retirement for one last job: rescuing her granddaughter from a Frankish mercenary. Naturally the client isn't telling Amina everything, and naturally the job turns out to have more repercussions than either of them expected.
It was a life of banditry born out of tragedy, yes. But in choosing it, I had destroyed any hope of future respectability and was happy for it. Why not wear stolen pearls and a sailor's loincloth? Marry an oarsman I barely knew because he was achingly handsome and I wanted to fuck him? Drink stolen wine meant for a sultan across the world and fight duels at midnight?
Well. There were a great many reasons I should not have done those things, no longer did those things, and wince when I pray for forgiveness from the only One whose compassion is that encompassing. But as I ran my fingers over a crimson robe embroidered with clashing green sunbursts, the sweeter moments returned to me. The cloth still smelled of sea salt and oil, recalling coir ropes glistening with ocean spray, black bitumen-painted hulls, and the melodies of sailors against the beat of a barrel drum.
A relatively early Ellery Queen novel, published in 1934. This is detective fiction as logic puzzle; the characters are barely characters.
It isn't really a complete guide to C++20: it's a complete guide to the delta between C++17 and C++20. But that's quite enough: C++20 was a major revision to the language. The book is 700 pages long, and it's not padded. C++20 introduced major features like concepts, ranges, coroutines, and modules, and a ton of minor but nice features like jthread, format, and the spaceship operator.
Coroutines take up a noticeable fraction of the book, but I still wish that part had been longer. This book doesn't get into the really important questions: what real-world problems coroutines are useful for; best practices for using coroutines to solve those problems; what mental model you should have for the relationship between promise types, coroutines handles, coroutine interfaces, and the coroutine itself; why C++20 coroutines were designed the way they were.
The third Albert Campion mystery, originally published 1931. It reads to me more like a thriller than a detective story. This time it's about art theft. Like the first two books, it includes an international gang of super-crooks.
The third book of the Unstoppable YA space fantasy trilogy, and a finalist for the Locus and Lodestar awards.
The second book ended on rather a low point, as second books of trilogies often do. At the beginning of Promises Stronger than Darkness the space fascists have taken over the government, the main characters have discovered that there's something even worse than the ancient curse they faced in the first book and that all of the galaxy's inhabited worlds are about to be destroyed, and the main character is sort of dead. Things get better, although not immediately.
A secondary-world fantasy, and one of the Best Novel finalists for the 2024 Hugo. The first chapter begins when the main character is a child, tutored in magic and murder and raised as a weapon for his mother's plan of revenge. You do have to sort of admire someone who's hard-core enough about revenge against a religious sect that her plan involves teaching her son to commit all of the religion's major unforgiveables, beginning with matricide.
Most of the book takes place when the main character is a young adult in a foreign modern city, complete with cellphones and bureaucracy and race science and dating apps. The main character isn't the only one in the city with a strange mystical destiny that may or may really be his: “There's a support group for unchosen ones, which was recomended to him by the therapist he's been seeing ever since he learned what a therapist was.”
My favorite part of the book was probably the nightmarish prison sequence, which reads like a mixture of Kafka and Banks.
Al got to see the new Broadway production of Uncle Vanya. I didn't, alas (a fact that makes me very envious), but at least it inspired me to reread the play.
One of the Best Novel finalists for the 2024 Hugo. These days Martha Wells is best known as the author of the Murderbot stories, but in fact most of her published fiction has been fantasy. This is her first fantasy novel in a while; as far as I can tell it's a standalone, unrelated to any of her previous series. We gradually learn that the book is about rebuilding the world after a terrible war; the invaders were defeated, but that's not the end even generations later. The dual timeline is interesting, as is the treatment of gender.
Unless I missed it somewhere, there's an odd omission: as far as I could tell we never learn why the main character is known as Witch King given that he's neither a witch nor a king.
One of the nominees for the 2024 Lodestar Award, the not-a-Hugo award for best YA novel. The main character is a 16 year old girl growing up on a seasteading community that has somehow managed to survive for 40 years, despite libertarians not being the best at cooperation or keeping infrastructure running. One of the interesting things about it is that although both the community and the main character's father are horrible, neither of them are completely devoid of positives and the main character has mixed feelings about both.
I thought this would be a bit like a noir novel, where the equivalent of a detective is given what appears to be a minor missing person case and it ends up having far-reaching repercussions that expose corruption in the society as a whole. That sort of happens, but it's just a small part of the book. Most of it is about something else.
It's told in an interestingly distanced way, written some decades after the murder, and told by a narrator who I think is never named. The story is nonlinear, sometimes tightly focused on the minutest events of Santiago Nasar's last day and sometimes pulling back to refer to the intervening time. Partly it's about the absurdity of an honor killing, partly it's an indictment, partly it's about the impossibility of understanding the past no matter how many details one establishes.
The first sentence reminded me of the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I was amused to see a brief mention of Colonal Aureliano Buendía.
Just as one would expect from the title, it's a heist novel in outer space. Most of it takes place in the Belt and the Jovian moons, but yes, we do indeed get to the Kuiper. All of the characters are con artists or thugs or thieves or criminals of some other flavor, of course, and it takes a while to figure out who's conning whom. It ends up being a little more serious than your average caper novel.
It's a finished story but it appears to be the the first in a series. I'll read the other ones once David writes them!
The last book of the Lymond Chronicles. We know from history that Ivan the Terrible's voevode wasn't Francis Crawford of Lymond or M. le comte François de Sevigny, so the question isn't whether Lymond will fail in his attempt to return to Muscovy, but how he fails. And then of course there's the deeper question of just why he's so desperate to leave Europe, why he doesn't want to go back to Scotland ever again, why he and his wife (unlikely as it seems that such a person exists) are so determined to annul their marriage.
Most of this book is set during the Italian War of 1551–59. It ends just before the peace treaty and the political marriage that's featured in the Fontainebleau scene at the beginning of Don Carlos.
In which Charlie Fitzer's rich uncle dies and Charlie inherits his villain business, complete with volcano lair. It's a light quick read, and one of the 2024 Hugo nominees for best novel.
Linear algebra, vector calculus, Bayesian probability, optimization, and application to some machine learning problems, such as linear regression, Principal Component Analysis, and Support Vector Machines. It doesn't get into deep learning, but it does cover all of the mathematics required for understanding backprop.
Mathematics for Machine Learning is published by Cambridge University Press and is also freely available on https://mml-book.com, where the authors seem to be keeping it continuously updated. The version I read had the timestamp 2024-01-15.
Mariage is a French word that's exactly the cognate it sounds like, and it's also used, not just in France, for food/wine pairings. Most of this book is about Shizuku helping the owners of a wine-focused izakaya with their pairings.
The Drops of God ended with a 6-6 tie, and with Shizuku planning to travel abroad to deepen his understanding of wine. Drops of God: Mariage begins a year later, with Shizuku back in Japan and with the events of the last year only hinted at. There's no mention of the next phase of the contest, or any of the continuing characters other than Shizuku, until the very end.
Among other things it's a mystery story: the famous detective W. W. Brierson is hired by Marta Korolev's widow to find her murderer. There's a second and bigger mystery in the background: the Extinction. Something unknown happened some time in the 23rd century, fifty million years ago, that ended human civilization. The only people remaining were the ones who happened to be in stasis at the time. Stasis means one-way time travel, intentional or otherwise, and the Korolevs have been rescuing those few survivors scattered across time. They've finally managed to assemble just barely enough people that, if all goes well, it might be possible to restart a viable species and to start a new civilization fifty million years after the end of the first one. Perhaps the two mysteries are linked. Perhaps someone, or something, wants the Korolevs to fail.
Marooned in Realtime was a relatively early Vinge novel, published in 1986. It didn't win a Hugo, unlike three of his later books, and it's probably not his best. It's always been the one that's resonated with me the most and that I've reread most often, though, perhaps because I happened to read it at the right time. The parts that stuck with me the most are the conversations about the past between Brierson and his chief suspects, the handful of advanced travelers who left civilization decades after him: Della Lu's stories of what she was looking for on her fifty megayears of interstellar exploration, Yelén Korolev's explanations of what she and Marta were trying to do, Tunç Blumenthal's reminiscences of the wonders of his life in the early 23rd century before an industrial accident flung him into the far future, what a single year of progress meant by 2209.
This book is the only depiction I've ever seen of a libertarian utopia that didn't come across to me as a hellhole. Perhaps the key is the same thing Vinge observed about writing convincingly about superintelligence, which also comes up in this novel: it helps if it's indirect or secondhand, rather than trying to depict the unimaginable. This is also the first book I read that engages with deep time, a world with plausible new species and mountain ranges and continents.
And of course this book is where I first heard of the Singularity, a word that Vinge first used in this sense just a few years before he wrote Marooned in Realtime, in his now-famous 1983 Omni piece.
Lymond is a wreck at the end of Pawn in Frankincense, and he's a wreck for most of The Ringed Castle. His version of being a wreck, of course, is throwing himself into an impossible task with frightening competence and alienating everyone who wants to be close to him. Part of this book is set in the palaces of Queen Mary (not to be confused with Mary Queen of Scots, or her mother the Dowager Queen Mary de Guise) and King Philip (king of Naples and Sicily in his own right, king of England by marriage, and king of Spain by the end of the book). Even more of it is set in Muscovy, where Lymond is helping the powerful and erratic Tsar Ivan IV build the foundations of a new Russia. Lymond plays chess in this book too, this time with Ivan the Terrible.
Lymond meets a number of powerful and enigmatic characters, both real and fictional, including Mary's closely watched sister Elizabeth, the explorer Richard Chancellor, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, and the mathematician and astrologer and wizard John Dee. He learns the familiar lesson, that prophecies don't always come true in the obvious way.
Fyodor Ivanovich is an infant by the end of the book, and Philip's son is a preadolescent. Naturally I had to listen to Boris Godunov and Don Carlos while reading this book.
None of this book takes place in Scotland. It begins in Baden and then the rest of it takes place in the Mediterranean: Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny in his public persona is a special envoy conveying a royal present from the King of France to the Sultan. In his private persona he's on the track of the enemy who was defeated but not killed at the end of The Disorderly Knights, and of a baby who might be Lymond's son. The journey includes Lyons, Algiers, Aleppo, Chios, and Constantinople, even the seraglio of Suleiman the Magnificent himself. There's a literal chess game in this book, not just the figurative one of the title, albeit with unusual rules.
It occurred to me that you get some spoilers for these books just from knowing that they are historical novels and that Dunnett was careful not to change the major events of history. The identities of people like the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John after the death of Juan de Homedes, or the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, or the French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, are recorded facts. Even if one can't name any of those people, just the fact that they're historical figures, rather than fictional characters, is enough to know something about the possible trajectories of the novels' fictional heroes and villains.
I was confused when I started this book. It seems to begin during the war between England and Scotland, and I thought the war ended in the previous book, Queens' Play. The chapter headings have dates, though! The first two chapters are set in 1548–9 and chapter 3 starts in 1551. All of Queens' Play takes place in between chapters 2 and 3. That's when the war ends, and when Francis Crawford of Lymond loses the title he had in the first book, Master of Culter, and gains a new one, Comte de Sevigny, and becomes a person of political importance in both Scotland and France.
The knights of the title are the Noble Order of Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. Some of The Disorderly Knights takes place in Scotland and a bit in France, but about half of it is set in the Mediterranean, and the characters include the forces of the Emperor and the Sultan. Some of the Hospitallers are hoping to recruit Lymond to their order as a warrior monk, some of the factions in the French court find it to their advantage for Lymond to be absent for a time; Lymond has reasons of his own for going to Malta, which is expected to soon be attacked by a huge Ottoman force.
Naturally I had to rewatch The Maltese Falcon, which begins just a few years before this book.
The “with Python” part isn't really the point; almost all deep learning will involve Python in one way or another. What's really distinctive about this book is that it's a detailed explanation of how to do deep learning using TensorFlow and Keras, written by Keras's main creator. It goes all the way from basic linear algebra and gradient descent through convolutional networks, the Transformer architecture, and generative deep learning.
Deep Learning with Python glosses over a lot of the theory, but it's an excellent introduction to the practical aspects: how you use Keras to build deep networks from layers, which loss functions to use for which problems, how to recognize and avoid overfitting, when and why to use tricks like dropout layers, max pooling layers, and residual connections, when to use 16-bit floating point, how to download Kaggle datasets, how to use Colab to train your models on GPUs and TPUs. In a field that, as the author says, is still “more alchemy than science,” that's a fine tradeoff.
Recommended.
Château d'Yqem, 1976. And… That's the end.
This is the last volume of The Drops of God. It ends with a 6-6 tie between Shizuku and Issei in the Apostle battles, as most readers probably expected from the beginning, and there are hints that Yutaka expected it too. Both of the brothers are left wondering about the final battle, the “Drops of God” itself. Both of them are still wondering what Yutaka was trying to do with his will. The relationship between Shizuku and Issei is still unresolved, and the relationship between Shizuku and Miyabi is only partly resolved. The role of Loulan and Chris is still mysterious.
According to Wikipedia there's a sequel: Drops of God: Mariage (神の雫 最終章), published between 2015 and 2020. At least some of it has now been translated into English.
Both competitors think they've found the Twelfth Apostle, which is not an aged red Bordeaux. The night before the final competition, perhaps by coincidence and perhaps not, Shizuku, Issei, Loulan, and Chris all open the same wine: a 1998 Alain Robert Le Mesnil Reserve Brut.
The title refers to chess, as do the titles of all of the Lymond books, but it also refers literally to queens. Queens' Play begins a couple years after The Game of Kings. Mary Queen of Scots is now seven years old, living at the court of Henri II and Catherine de' Medici and engaged to the Dauphin. The Queen Dowager, Mary de Guise, is visiting her after a long absence from France. It's a period of uneasy peace between Scotland, England, and France, but both the French and Scottish courts are full of scheming factions, and the English and Irish have their own plans, and there's at least one assassination conspiracy.
Probably all of these books need to be read more than once. A lot of what's going on is unstated, and is understandable only in retrospect.
The quest for the Twelfth Apostle continues. For both competitors the theme of the passage of time, as reflected in the aged wine they're looking for, has parallels in their friends' personal lives.
The last contest has begun, the search for the Twelfth Apostle. Yutaka Kanzaki's description of the wine is intricate and seems to have something to do with the passage of time. Both competitors think they're looking for an aged wine, and Shizuku is learning what 50 year old Burgundy and Bordeaux is like.
The first book of the Lymond Chronicles, a series of historical novels written in the 60s and 70s. The Game of Kings is set in mid 16th century Scotland at a time when both Scotland and England have children on the throne, the four year old Mary and the eleven year old Edward. There's perpetual low level war with a constant threat of escalation, high international politics involving all the major powers of Europe, and scheming, rebellion, and double dealing by border lords on both sides of the border. The main character, Francis Crawford of Lymond, is an excommunicated outlaw: all but convicted of treason against Scotland in absentia, mistrusted in England and France, and quick witted, erudite, enormously competent, charismatic, dangerous, and still an important political player. There are hints from early on that there's more to his supposed treason than his fellow nobles think.
I tried to read this book once before and didn't even make it through the first chapter: a friend bought it for me to read when I was recovering from heart surgery. In retrospect, a book with intricate plots and deceptions, where you have to work hard to understand what's going on and who's lying to whom, was the wrong choice of reading material when I was in pain and heavily drugged. I got a lot more out of it this time, and I'll read the next five Lymond books.
Most of this volume, which was originally published in 2013, is about Japanese wine, focusing on Taiyo Beer's wine department trying to convince executives that Japan's wineries are now good enough that consumers will be willing to buy a curated ¥14,200 gift set of three domestic wines. Apparently there are varietals used only in Japan, such as Koshu and Muscat Bailey A. Now I'm curious!
2008 Ferrer Bobet Priorat Selección Especial.
The cast of characters continues to expand, and Shizuku and Issei both return to Japan with wines that they think express the right sunset and wind.
Shizuku and Issei are both in Spain, in quest of sunsets.
Just what it sounds like: an undergrad textbook on linear algebra from a computer science point of view. It's not exactly a class in computational linear algebra, but it does define things like vector and matrices in terms of Python, it's restricted to finite-dimensional vector spaces, and it explains which algorithms do and don't make sense given the realities of floating-point numbers. For example, determinants are described only briefly and only toward the end, and the book explains why it's a bad idea to try to compute eigenvalues by numerically finding roots of det(λI - A).
I read this partly to refresh my memory and partly because, even though it's been a long time since I actually studied physics, I'm still more used to linear algebra from a physics point of view.
The Eleventh Apostle, both competitors think, is from Spain. The cast of characters expands to include the two owners of a Tokyo wine bar that specializes in Spanish wine, whose patrons are expected to take sides in their fierce Madrid/Barcelona football rivalry.
This is the first time I've read anything by Anne Brontë, although I have of course read books by both of her sisters. It's structurally interesting: a good half of the book, by page count, is a story within a story: the main character reading Mrs. “Graham”'s diary.
It would have been a very different story if it had been set in a society where divorce was a thing.
The longest of the several arcs in this volume is a televised cooking and wine pairing battle between two French restaurants: the homey Ma Famille, being helped by Shizuku and Miyabi, and the underhanded Maison de Grand Cru. Reminds me that I should drink more Alsatian wine.
Robert Sirugue Grands-Échézeaux Grand Cru 2002.
Shizuku and Issei both complete their quests, and both of them return to Japan with bottles that they think are the Tenth Apostle. This volume ends just before it's revealed to the reader, except that it's a red Burgundy and it's something that's very rare and hard to obtain.
Yutaka Kanzaki's description of the Tenth Apostle is unusually enigmatic even for this contest. It includes a quote from the 10th century poet Ki no Tsurayuki, and cosmic imagery that reminds me of 2001, and concludes: “This wine is a soul. This wine is the vast land, viewed from above. This wine is the broad expanse of space. And this wine is ‘hope.’”
Both competitors find this complex and mysterious. Shizuku flies to France in the hope of gaining a deeper understanding of the complex maze of Burgundy wine, focusing on Vosne-Romanée. Issei has a more mystical approach and he flies to, of all places, Waikiki. Naturally, both of them encounter beautiful young women who speak perfect Japanese and are in urgent need of a wine consultation.