Angela Ambroz

Nothing new to say, except that I cried.

I made it. I MADE IT! I never thought I'd make it.

Essentially a survey of world history, as interpreted through the lens of Acemoglu and Robinson's institutionalist theories, this was (a) a TOME that was a slog to read (like any good history book!), but (b) ultimately very rewarding, with numerous fascinating tidbits of information.

The basic thesis, which Acemoglu and Robinson repeat (perhaps over-repeat), is that the fate of nations rests on the relative extractive vs. inclusive institutional frameworks (both political and economic) which they create and are created by. So, for example, if your country has an extractive state that preys on its people, it's unlikely those people will have much incentive to invest or innovate (or even stick around, if they can help it). It's a relatively straightforward concept. I'm a microeconomist who every so often goes, “Oh yeeeeah - POLITICS can be a thing in economics too!”, and I've been sold on the institutionalist interpretation of development for a while (certainly as a better theory than a geographical determinist one, i.e. hot countries can't develop because it's just too damn hot and everyone gets malaria). So it was basically preaching to the choir.

What I was surprised by was the absence of Acemoglu and Robinson's work on using settler mortality rates as an instrument for whether colonies would adopt inclusive or extractive institutions. The colonial/settler story is there, but much more muted. And I find it quite interesting! (Especially from an empirical point of view, since finding good identification strategies for (1) macro (!?!), and (2) from the past (!!) seems a very thorny problem to me. But I digress!)

I don't think I really got this. But then, that's poetry for ya. Some of the poems managed to get through the thicket of even my mind - and they were pretty wonderful indeed.

Oh man, so capital-L Life got in the way of my properly absorbing this book, and I spent most of it just skimming with eyes glazed over. But, in the rare moments I was able to actually focus, I did enjoy it. Ross King captures the personalities and politics of 15th century Florence, with the irascible Filippo Brunelleschi vs. the vain/ambitious Lorenzo Ghiberti. Who knew!

Here's a Khan Academy video on the Dome itself, and why it's magnificent from an engineering (and not just aesthetic) perspective. Go, Filippo. Go, Florence. Go, Renaissance.

I'm not sure who this book is pitched to - maybe it resonates with people who already have a pretty good knowledge of JavaScript. For complete newbies, or people at level 1.1 noob, it feels really scattered and mostly baffling. I found Interactive Data Visualization for the Web a lot friendlier - and richer, in terms of both explanations and resources for further study.

One (pretty big) plus point, to Mike Dewar's credit, is his hands-on example using the New York City subway. I sometimes complain about the examples used in code tutorials (they skew heavily towards the interests of middle-aged white dudes - e.g. program a poker game! replicate Pong!), and I appreciated something that was: (1) civics-ish, (2) urban design-y, and (3) with a lot of depth (there are so many questions one could ask about the New York City subway, amirite?).

An enormous, ambitious historical fantasy that is hugely charming, often adorable. It's an epic (over 1,000 pages of tomeness), but it never feels weighty or bogged down. Instead, it's airy, light, fun, and constantly absorbing. It's written with such Jane Austeny humor that you can't help but become a bit infatuated with it, to laugh with it and to miss it when it's gone. I don't think I've ever read 1,000 pages so quickly. I yearned for it at work, or when I was out with friends. I read the last 400 pages in one bedsore-inducing marathon Saturday. I'm sad that I had to finish it.

First of all, huge kudos to Susanna Clarke. She's worldbuilt to the finest degree; creating an enormous, cohesive mystical and mysterious mythos that rivals Tolkien and Herbert. Kudos also because - unlike Tolkien and Herbert, who placed their worlds firmly beyond our reality - Clarke marries hers comfortably to our own; specifically, to a whole host of 19th century English traditions. This might be a very alternative reality, where England was once divided into a Northern and Southern kingdom, the former ruled by a magician-king in the 12th century. But it feels very, very embedded in actual history, and actual literary traditions from the period. Early portions of the book read like Georgian era comedies of manners - Pride and Prejudice and Magic! When the action moves to the Napoleonic wars, it turns into the Sharpe series. Later, it becomes Romantic, Byronic, mid-century fantasy horror: epistolary like Bram Stoker, Gothic and grotesque like Shelly. Throughout, some Arthurian hat-tips - once and future kings, King George III as a Fisher King, and a deep, Romantic connection (connexion!?) to the sublime mystery of Nature.

But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Basically, the story follows the revival of modern English magic - in the form of an odd couple buddy movie. Mr. Norrell (played by Michael Gambon in my head) is an anti-social, curmudgeony, prim and prudish pedant. He's a Yorkshire gentleman and one of the first people, in the year 180-something, that can practice - rather than just study or talk about - magic. He moves to London intending to revive English magic; all the while stressing that it's important not to meddle with the darker, scarier, more unpredictable sorts of magic - fairies, and the Raven King, and all that. He's also sooooo boring, and reading of the various antics and social pickles he gets into is a source of constant delight and humor. Oh, how I loved Mr. Norrell sometimes, and how surprising he could be.

Later, he's joined by Jonathan Strange (obviously David Tennant) - who's younger, sexier, sillier, more sociable and more distractable. He's also probably a better talent at magic, even if he's all over the place. Strange gets invited by the various glitterati of 19th century British history - the Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister - to solve Important Historical Problems (like Napoleon) using magic. Where Mr. Norrell (Normal?) is cautious, Strange jumps right in. Hilarity ensues (well, sort of). Some sadness too. Indeed, a great meta moment is when Strange - having suffered various slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - has become a bit Byronic. The writing here turns Shelly/Stoker/Byron-ish, and who else does Strange meet in the story than... Shelly and Byron!? Ha! (Too early for Stoker, I guess.)

The rest of the story follows from the Norrell/Strange dichotomy, though it's not entirely predictable. Yes, Norrell/Strange threaten to become the standard Disciplined Master/Rogue Pupil archetype (Obi-Wan/Anakin, kung fu master/kung fu student, etc.), but Clarke subverts this formula in interesting ways. And she never forgets her setting; this book is deeply connected to its traditions, both in form (her use of Georgian language and writing style) and content (the folk history of Ye Olde Englande and all its magickalness).

An absolute pleasure; highly recommended.

Edited to add: I should note that I didn't read any of the footnotes; thinking instead to get through the story first, and delve into the worldbuilding curlicues later. Reading some of the other reviews, it seems some of the 1-star people got fed up with too much footnoting.

Ooooh. Eheuuuu. Eheu.

How very sad. How very good. How very miserable our little girl protagonist is, mamma mia. I finish this book with such a heavy heart. I mean, no spoilers, but I shouldn't be this sad. Oh my goodness. That was good though. Recommend!

So this is the second in the Earthsea n-ology, Ursula Le Guin's (my master!) wonderful, deep, rich, intelligent response to YA-ish high fantasy. It follows several years after the events of A Wizard of Earthsea, AKA How Ged the Little Asshole Gets His Magickal Groove Back. This is about another little asshole: a young girl named Arha. Arha has been selected, Dalai Lama-style (Le Guin DEFINITELY INCORPORATES TIBET STUFF), as the reincarnated high priestess of the “Nameless Ones”, who seem to be unpleasant cave gods, basically. At five years old, she's swept up into a dark palace full of other priestesses and eunuchs, a palace that sits on top of the “Undertomb” (dark tomb cavern, important god-place) and “the Labyrinth” (dark labyrinth, treasures hidden, also god-place). Everything in this place is dark, run-down, and basically shitty.

And yea, verily, it is a shitty destiny Arha has fallen into. Though she doesn't realize it at first. DAMN, but she is a little shit in the beginning. Snide, mean-spirited, blindly devoted to the Nameless Ones and her authority; she bats away the quotidian kindnesses of her eunuch guardian, Manan, and her best friend, Penthe, and just basically acts like a brat. IRONICAL given she spends most of her young life churning butter and wearing a shitty black sack.

HENNYYWAAYYYY. The book starts slow - intentionally, I think - to mimic the oppressive boredom and petty shittiness of Arha's life in the palace. One day, she is shocked - SHOCKED - to discover (a) light in the Undertomb WTF this place is supposed to be holy pitch dark (!!) and (b) a MAN (!) WTF NO MEN ALLOWED HERE SO SACRILEGE and (c) trying to steal the Undertomb's magical booty! It's not a spoiler, I would guess, to say that this man is not just any dude but Ged himself! An older, wiser, chiller Ged, I am happy to report.

And from there churns the plot, which I won't spoil further.

So I basically worship at Le Guin's shrine, and I admired two - NAY, THREE - big qualities in this book. First, plot. Much like The Lathe of Heaven - or, honestly, any of her other books - she deftly reveals, layer by layer, a thick, juicy plotty momentum. The pacing and meditative style reflects SO WELL the mindset of Arha, as - slowly, slowly - the oppressive, shitty cobwebs of her brain are removed, revelation by revelation. You are VERY WITH HER on this journey, and it's so well done.

SECOND. High fantasy always seems to have a strong, naturalist quality. People are super in touch with their Middle-Earth-sea natural world. Forest elves, etc. What I like about the Earthsea books, and Le Guin does it a lot in this book as well, is how richly meditative the descriptions are. You feel and taste the dank tunnels, the roaring mountain stream, the salty and vast sea. It's very tactile. I normally find place descriptions boring, something that slows me down. But here, I let myself be slowed down, and I liked it. The world engages you on all senses.

AND THIRD. I actually didn't get this until I read Le Guin's afterword, for I am a simple person, but she was apparently making some big points about Growing Up Female in a patriarchal, hierarchical society, which now, upon reflection, I'm like oooooh. Duh! So that heavy weight on my heart and Arha's heart was, ahem, THE WEIGHT OF THE PATRIARCHY. V good.

Still much much better than Harry Potter and LOTR, and like x10000000 times better than godawful godstupid unholy godking George RR Martin's stuff DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED.

Lovely, as the previous Earthsea books have been. As all Le Guin is.

In Book 3, Ged/Sparrowhawk is now Archmage of, er, Earthsea - whatever the main map is about - and is summoned, by Handsome Young Prince Arren, to look into a general problem that people are observing: a great sickness is eating away at the outer lands. Wizards are losing their mojo. Crops are dying. People are being weird. SICK LAND.

Ged has kind of an inkling of what's up and, after Arren is moved to bow down and pledge himself (“MY LIEGE!”) to him, enlists Arren as his squire in what is essentially a long road movie. They pass through a variety of islands in this island world. There's the sad, shitty island where everyone's addicted to a type of opium, the market sucks, and Ged + Arren meet a messed-up, wild-eyed wizard who speaks in riddles. There's the sad, aggro town where they can't dye their silks very well anymore, everyone gets sort of pathetically mad, and they meet a messed-up, wild-eyed wizard who speaks in riddles (yes, another one). There's lots of sea travel. There's an awesome boat society interlude. There are dragons. I won't spoil anymore.

Anyway, the magic of Le Guin's fantasy is how richly tactile it is, and how ponderously wise. As I've said before, it's better Tolkien than Tolkien. This one felt a bit like T.H. White's Once and Future King, in that it combined a genuine feeling of Legend with a genuine feeling of mundane, quotidian humanity. Good values!

Lovely and lovely. I read it also with a parental eye, thinking what age might be appropriate to introduce Earthsea to a kid. There's some deep meditations on mortality, human folly, and one very gross (and scary) scene of violence, so maybe tweens.

Aahhhhh, Ursula LeGuin is a genius. A GENIUS, I TELL YOU!! I can't get over how incredibly GENIUSY this woman is.

It had been a few months that I had thought of re-reading The Dispossessed, especially after moving to Tanzania and getting all my econ heart all discombobulated by the harried contradictions of development work. Commodified, commodified, arghh, everything is commodified! And corporate, and multinational, and a totally lopsided playing field. Just thinking about development issues, and the constant struggle of “developing” countries to adapt to our current Western-centric, capitalist, corporatist system, made me reeeeally want to pick this up again.

And I'm so glad I did. Because this spec fic story is so good, in so many ways. The book is set in LeGuin's “Hainish” universe (the Hainverse?), where there are a handful of known, human-inhabited worlds that have - after a long period of separation and isolation from each other - begun to reconnect. And we learn that the planet of Hain is the oldest human place, that colonized the others, and blah blah. This is BACKGROUND, and perhaps not even necessary to the review. If only to say that this book, coupled with LeGuin's other Hugo/Nebula winner (because she was baller enough to win both, twice!), Left Hand of Darkness, are both so good, so smart, and so different.

In The Dispossessed, we focus on a pair of twin planets, Urras and Anarres, that couldn't be more different. Each is, depending on your point of view, a dual utopia-dystopia and extreme version of Earth. Urras is beautiful, bountiful, glorious, and basically Earth of the 20th century. It has a big, powerful capitalist nation, a big Soviet-style one, and a big bloc of poorer, “developing” countries. Anarres, instead, is barren, dusty, with a pretty lame ecosystem whose most complex organism is a fish. It's also an anarchic commune-style place, with no governments or nations, established 150 years ago by a group of Urras anarchists inspired by the works and philosophy of some badass, legendary political theorist and anarchist named Odo.

The story centers around a physicist, Shevek, from the anarchic Anarres. Shevek is on the cusp of figuring out a massive, totally awesome physics theory, similar in scope and profundity as Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Something that could shake the very foundations of reality itself!... And, incidentally, make space travel quite a bit easier (yay for Hain stuff! yay for reconnecting!). The book begins with Shevek undertaking a trip to Urras, in the hopes of chatting physics and working with other scientists there. Obviously, there are massive political implications to his action (it does feel a lot like a Cold War-era defection, except Shevek's not really fleeing from Anarres). Everything follows from there.

And damn, it's good. One thing I love about LeGuin (and Haldeman does this a bit as well, I believe in Forever Peace), is that she introduces characters without describing their physical appearance for a while and then - when she does - you're jarred when she reveals that they're a, for example, Indian woman (rather than a white man, as you had been assuming for so long). I was jarred so many times by this meta trick of hers that I started getting really concerned about just how many patriarchal prejudices I harbored in my nominally fem heart. For example, Odo is spoken of with great reverence throughout the book. We hear of this great political thinker, this freedom fighter, who wrote an epic while unjustly incarcerated. And then LeGuin drops in that “she” also did this. And you're like, “Oh, Odo's a woman?” Because, of course, my default assumption was that she was a man. And I was surprised. And then I was disappointed that I was surprised. And then I was impressed with LeGuin (yet again), for showing me - both explicitly within the story, and implicitly within the writing - just how brainwashing some hegemonies can be.

The moments that feature “Terra” (i.e. Earth) are also intellectually whimsical in the best spec fic style. Of course, you're dead curious to hear about what Terra is like, you want to know what century it is so you can just place this whole damn Hainish cycle, and LeGuin drops the hints and the info with her usual deftness and intelligence. Aaahhh, I love it so much. URSULAAAAA! You are magical.

As with Left Hand of Darkness, and as with her short stories, I'll no doubt carry this story and these ideas rattling around in my head for years and years. Indeed, as I have already! But refreshing them was a great move.

I have so much more I could say, but I'll just say, READ IT. Highly, highly recommended.

2.5 stars, rounded up. Kind of a drag, and not up to usual Ursula benchmark. A heavy-handed, unimaginative conclusion to an otherwise excellent Earthsea series.

So the previous Earthsea books were meditative, nature-soaked high fantasy tales that out-Tolkiened Tolkien. They followed Ged, your usual talented but proud hero wizard, as he (in the first book) learned his wizarding ways and accidentally unleashed a hell-demon in his teens, (in the second book) freed a creepy girl-queen from her crypt kingdom in his ~20s (?), and (in the third book) made friends with an awesome noble prince and dealt with a widespread magickal problem in his ~50s (as Archmage, by then, even!).

So book 4 picks up days after book 3 - Ged is JUUUST back from his Hades excursion - and 25 years after book 2 - so the girl-queen is now an older lady. OLDER LADY. Do you hear me? OLDER WOMAN, THE PROTAGONIST OF THIS BOOK IS AN OLDER WOMAN DO YOU HEAR ME DAMMIT. Is that clear enough!?! Because Ursula Le Guin wants you to be damn sure that you are aware that THIS IS A FEMINIST BOOK WITH AN OLDER WOMAN PROTAGONIST DID YOU KNOW THAT “WOMEN'S WORK” IS UNPAID EVEN IN AGRARIAN SOCIETIES IT'S NOT JUST CAPITALISM THAT CREATES THE PATRIARCHY YOU KNOW –

Oh? Too overt for you? Yeah, me too.

I don't know why Le Guin wrote it like this - especially given how subtle and nuanced her handling of gender was in one of her masterpieces, The Left Hand of Darkness - but here it is sledgehammer obvious. While I started the book pleased and refreshed by Goha AKA Tenar AKA the girl-queen from Tombs of Atuan AKA AN OLDER WOMAN YOU DON'T SEE MANY OF THOSE AS PROTAGONISTS EH INDEED THEY ARE INVISIBLE DAMN YOU PATRIARCHY DAMN YOU. But, really, I was pleased, because Le Guin was making excellent points - through Tenar's thoughts - about how, indeed, invisible older women are in men's eyes, how being a mom both incredibly limits you in your freedoms but adds richness and how dudes are BLIND I TELL YOU BLIND re: picking up the damn dishes.

But then Le Guin's hand becomes quite heavy and Tenar - who already felt like an authorial stand-in - began to feel like a Mary Sue, what with Ged coming back all busted up and handsome with his handsome hair and handsome aquiline nose and HANDSOME I GET IT URSULA HE'S HOT - and wtf there are romantic feelings between Tenar and Ged?! I thought Tenar was a CHILD when Ged saved her from that crypt kingdom place?! Whaaat.

So yeah, basically this last book felt like indulgent fanfiction ABOUT the Earthsea universe. While the previous books featured ponderous, ominous villains in the style of Hayao Miyazaki villains - it's all gray! - this book featured two main villains, a rapist (!) and a mediocre mid-level wizard who - AND I AM NOT SHITTING YOU - puts a (literal) hex on Tenar because he just damn hates uppity women. What? WHAT?! This was all so absurd that I was like, really?

Oh yeah, that reminds me - there's another character: a young girl who was terribly victimized by her family and gets terribly burned. Tenar adopts her. It is implied she has magical powers too.

But mostly the book is Tenar thinking angry thoughts about how shitty the patriarchy is, and how none of these damn men do their dishes or realize that women live in fear etc etc. I was honestly bummed by how blunt - and even limited! - it all was. Ursula! This is not how you usually do your thing!

Indeed, her afterword immediately begins on the defensive - and she basically accuses the people who were disappointed by this book as being crypto-sexists that can't handle an old woman protagonist and so on. Which is a bummer cuz I (a) am a lady, (b) and thus am super on board with how the patriarchy sucks and yes, “women's work” has always been constricted to unpaid labor - LABOR - throughout the ages, but (c) indeed probably arising sometime around the agricultural revolution, but (d) I CAN STILL FIND THIS HEAVY-HANDED. Oof.

In other news, Ged was described with such loving affection - such a handsome man! - that I decided to cast David Strathairn as him in my head. You're welcome.

I was meditating on adding and reviewing this on Goodreads yesterday at dinner, while I was cooking some chicken legs in red wine (and enjoying it very much!). This is the magisterial Bible of Italian cooking: my nonna, my zie (aunts), and mamma mia (!) all have it. It's giant. It covers everything. It's “authentic” - i.e. it's recognized as the Bible of cooking in Italy, so you won't find abominations like “spaghetti with meatballs” or “alfredo sauce” in it. FALSE GODS.

It's served me very well over the years, especially on the go-to's:
- Tiramisu. I've made this 10+ times, it's reliable and delicious and has a big wow factor at parties. Yo, it's easy, you just need mascarpone.
- Pizza dough. Another good wow factor for parties. Also very handy. Also tasty.
- Bolognese sauce. My husband was shocked, SHOCKED, that only tomato paste (and not sauce) is used in this. Yo, it's alllll meat, dude. Bologna! Famous for meat sauces, being sexually subversive, and being super left-wing! And Umberto Eco, I guess?
- Béchamel sauce, for lasagna and crepes and such. This was always mysterious. It's not so hard.
- Crepes.
- A bunch of chicken dishes.

I'd say the tldr of the book is:
- You can cook anything. If you have some leftover broccoli, the Silver Spoon will tell you what to do with them. (And I can probably guess: it'll be - boil them in salt water, fry in olive oil for a bit, and put some damn delicious cheese nearby. ECCOCI QUA!)
- Italian cooking, like Italian fashion, operates on a small number of simple rules of thumb: the soffritto, salting your boiling water, use cheese, blah blah. It also is HIGHLY dependent on the raw quality of the ingredients. A caprese salad is delicious because the mozzarella is watery-milky smooth. If you use rubbery knock-off mozz, I can guarantee you it will suck. (I have tried.)
- This is also the great tragedy of Italian cooking in America. It does not mix well with Big Food in America.
- Why, I remember moving from Rome to DC in 2003. I wanted to make some stuff. I couldn't find a can of beans in the supermarket that just had BEANS in them. Everything had preservatives, chemical ingredients. There's high fructose corn syrup in places you least expect. There's corn starch everywhere. SO MUCH CORN. It's in your diapers. For the love of God. It's awful. Food that's stripped of its taste, and then has the taste chemically re-injected VIA CORN. I'm tearing my hair out here.
- This is why, I think, American cultural manifestations of “Italian cooking” are two-fold: the low end of false god Italian cooking (Olive Garden, spaghetti with meatballs) - i.e. stuff that doesn't actually exist in Italy - and the high end of $30 prosciutto slices at some snobby restaurant. Both lead me to despair. The high-end places put a premium on the ingredients, and heap great snobby praise on them, but, EEN EETALEE, it's just a way to cure ham!! IT'S JUST HAM.

Food quality should not be only for the rich!!!!!

Anyway. The Silver Spoon. It will guide you well. Invest in the quality of your ingredients (good olive oil, good mozzarella, fresh veg and good meat) if you have the means and you'll be fine. Some stuff is hard to find (I've had trouble with ladyfinger biscuits, mascarpone, some prosciuttos, some cheeses), but Italian delis are in most cities. And most Italian cooking is super easy, with a long tail of complex bizarre stuff. Salt + olive oil = happy.

Rich, tactile, earthy goodness. I read somewhere (LeGuin's wiki?) that she read and deeply absorbed Tolkien and the Grimm brothers. I would say she outdoes them here. Controversial statement!?! Maybe. I stand by it!

She does mythical and folksy as well as Tolkien, but for about half the cost - airtight exposition and pacing, 100s of less pages (oof), and with none of that awkward “those dirty, swarthy Southrons” stuff (I raise my Social Justice Javelin and strike!)... Similarly, she does Grimm Brothers-style moral ambiguities driving moral fables where, hey kid, the world is ugly and brutal and tricksy. Watch out for wolves!

This is also, of course, a much better version of Harry Potter, but more on that later.

So, basic plot: Ged lives in Earthsea, mapped - like Middle Earth - on a FLAT 2D PLANE, NOT A GLOBE. i.e. What is north/south/east/west of Earthsea is left as an exercise to the reader. It is a land of many isles. Ged is a kid with strong magical power; when he protects his village from invading Vikings? hordes using magical mist, everyone is like, “you should become a wizard!” So, first, Ged spends some time in Zen wizard bootcamp (a la Yoda/a la Old Luke Skywalker) with Ogion, a gnarly old wizard. Ged is impatient (one of his many flaws) and so Ogion suggests he might get his jollies at the local Hogwarts Fast-paced Industrial Wizard Academy (sorry, er, forgot the name). Anyway, Ged does - BUT THE JOLLIES TURN PRETTY SOUR PRETTY FAST. He's a super fast learn. Really proud. SO PROUD. He also meets a couple student wizard bros - Jasper (an asshole, or maybe a righteous dude! another exercise to the reader) and Vetch (definitely a great dude).

I dunno if it's a spoiler but Ged's story is also very ancient/classical Greek, in that he has a TRAGIC FLAW (well, many): hubris, pride, young man dickishness. This leads to one major disaster which unspools the rest of the plot: Ged trying to fix said disaster. A metaphor for maturing/growing up? Maybe.

OKAY! SO STUFF I LIKED! I liked a lot of the stuff here.

First, allow me to don my Social Justice Helmet. So, I appreciated that Ged's world is dark-skinned. This jars, obviously, with High Fantasy's tendency to be basically Romanticized Celtic Stuff + Magic! When I googled Earthsea fanart vs. Wizard of Earthsea cover art, it looks like the fans got it but, uhhh, the marketers/publishers didn't. Amazing. Depressing. I mean, IT'S MENTIONED OVER AND OVER IN THE BOOK. He ain't a Celtic white dude - no matter how much you sell it like so! ARGHHHHHHHH

Anyway:

Second, I loved the world. I loved stuff like how it's a world of islands, every island gets their local wizard, and the wizard's job is to take care of mundane tasks like making “binding-spells” to keep the ships together. I loved that there was a strong culture of your “given name” (which is deeply private, tenderly protected, and rarely shared) versus your “use name” (which is what everyone calls you, your nickname). I loved the general power that naming and language had - like, literal magical power. And I love that Vetch worried (seemingly with reason!) that their magic doesn't work so well in other languages and other lands. Ha! I recognized a lot of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth worldbuilding in here; I'm assuming she was inspired by this?

Third, I loved Vetch - big crush. What a great dude!!!

Fourth, ON GED. So Ged is a Grimm-style/ancient Greek-style Flawed Hero. But instead of being nominally flawed, he is deeply, annoyingly flawed. And he is kinda flawed without reason. Like, Harry Potter is also flawed: remember all those ALL CAPS DIALOGUES from the later Potterbooks? Ugh, yeah. I know, right. But you're all like, well, Harry lived 11 years in a closet because of his abusive uncle and aunt. Of course he's gonna come out angry! Ged, on the other hand. GED! I think Ged had no problems in the village. I imagine he had a comfortable and loving childhood. He just is one cocky little bastard since he can magic so well! WELL. This book is all about his humbling.

Anyway. This was great. I loved it. LOVED IT. Wish I had found it when I was ~13. Wish I had been recommended it back in 2003 when I asked my LOTR fanfic friends for “more fantasy” recommendations and they recommended stupid Game of Thrones. PHOOEY. This is great. Could Ursula Le Guin do no wrong?!?! Anyway. Definitely reading the next 3 (4?) in the series.

George Saunders is a frickin' genius. The more I read him, the more I am completely bowled over. THE LAYERS, MAN, THE LAYERS.

Although I usually hate the stop-start rhythm of reading short story collections, I blazed through this. My favorite: The Semplica-Girls Diaries, written as the diary of a struggling, average, middle-class Dad who - to keep up with the Joneses - spends a bunch of money on hanging a few developing country women via a thin line threaded through their brains out in his yard (“It's painless.”; apparently, in this near future America, it's a thing). Oh, the humanity! Oh, the economic woe! OH, THE HEARTACHE. So smart. Worked on so many levels.

An excerpt:

There is so much I want to do and experience and give to kids. Time going by so quickly, kids growing up so fast. If not now, when? When will we give them largesse and sense of generosity? Have never been to Hawaii or parasailed or eaten lunch at café by ocean, wearing floppy straw hats just purchased on whim. So I worry: Growing up in paucity, won't they become too cautious? Not that they are growing up in paucity. Still, there are things we want but cannot have. If kids raised too cautious, due to paucity, will not world chew them up and spit out?

Warbly lines, nice splotches of monochromatic watercolor, and general gloom. This is a story I feel like I've heard a thousand times: (white) (male) (New Englander) Young Protagonist is haunted by his boozey, yet lovable, father and his mysterious disappearance from many moons ago. This comic gets marks for storytelling and craftsmanship, but demerits for the VERY thin plot and characterizations. They kind of market it as a Twilight Zone ep, which I can see: black and white, weird stuff that usually involves alienating, empty Coastal Small Town Americas, and then kind of a trite moral (“get over it”). Meh.

A charmingly quirky and touching story with, yes, a too-pat ending.

Our heroine is Nao Brown, a hafu (half-Japanese, half-English) 20something who frolics in a life of pixie adorableness, full of Miyazaki-inspired toyshops and quaint London pubs and the local Zen center and general geekery.

Beneath the surface, Nao is wrestling with a pretty severe case of OCD - with sudden, constant, intrusive thoughts of violence and gore. She copes and half-copes with these thoughts by reassuring herself that “Mum loves me! Mum thinks I'm good!” and half-hearted attempts at cognitive “homework”. But mostly she just pines for the bearded-and-barrel-chested local washing machine repairman, Gregory.

Interspersed with Nao's hafu (half-good, half-bad) life is a comic-within-the-comic about a nut-headed boy named Pictor. It's a long story. And it's very Miyazaki and weird.

The drawings are beautiful, a tribute to author Glyn Dillon severely straining his hand to make this story a reality. Delicate watercolors, wonderful gesture. The story is generally smart and captivating; OCD is rarely portrayed realistically in the media (Jack Nicholson skipping over sidewalks, et al.), and yet Dillon captures the distorted prison for what it is, focusing on an under-represented and poorly-recognized form of the disease.

One of the smart points in the book is its thematic use of heads, especially “wrong” heads: Pictor has a nut for a head, Nao understandably hates hers, Nao as the washing machine-head, whizzing with thoughts, and - finally - Nao as the Zen Enso-cum-washing machine head. So clever!

I don't think I got it. But then - I'm also a little tired of autobiographical graphic novels... Basically, this is an autobiographical graphic novel, in a diary format, of Gabrielle Bell's life in the late 2000s. She spends a fair amount of time worrying that her life is indulgent and banal. Which makes me feel bad, cuz... well, I found this pretty indulgent and banal. I feel like a jerk saying it, since it's a very “whole heart laid bare” type of memoir, but - argh, sorry. Just - no!

A straightforward, candid account. I appreciated Kofi's candor re: the backstage politicking at the UN, especially following 9/11. I was also jostled out of my US-centric viewpoint by his blunt assessments of the US since 2001.

Overall, he covers: the UN failures from the 1990s (Rwanda, Bosnia); Africa and Africa's political history (yay); the MDGs; 9/11 and the War on Terror. Am I missing any sections? It's much less a memoir in the proper sense - we get basically two lines between him flying off to Macalester College and then getting his first job at the UN - and it's much more a short political history, as seen from his (very interesting) vantage point.

A funny writerly tic: everyone - and I do mean EVERYONE - that appears in his entourage is described as “my most trusted...” or “the able...”, etc.

Fantastic. And important. It kills me that people don't educate themselves enough about this. This is a deeply pleasurable excoriation (yes, OK, sounds gross) of the inherently flawed personal finance industry. That is, the commodification of... money? The way that a combination of 1970s self-help trends with American individualism and the near-constant attack on and retreat of any form of social welfare in America has led to everyone (1) being a lot poorer, and (2) feeling like it's all their fault.

Featuring the work of many of my fave people in both economics research (Sendhil Mullainathan, Richard Thaler, Antoinette Schoar) and politics (Elizabeth Warren), with cameos from some other hell-raising notables (Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West), the author, Helaine Olen, builds up a strong argument: as employer-provided pensions disappeared from American industry, as Social Security dried up, and as everything got replaced by 401ks and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), two things happened. First, disguised as deeply American individualism, people were encouraged to “take responsibility” over their finances: saving diligently, investing wisely, and reaping the benefits. This is the old “if you're poor, it's your fault” argument. Second, an entire industry of quacks and charlatans was established to guide us and judge us on how we're not saving enough, or investing in the right way, or whatever.

And, meanwhile, the elephant in the room: that even the most Frugal Angela's diligent 401k would never have survived the tanking stock market of 2008, or the spasms of a contracting American economy (with its attendant job loss and slow recovery). I especially loved Olen's chapter on “women and money”: the story women are told is that they're highly emotional, irresponsible spenders who can't possibly understand complex financial products like an annuity, and must thus be guided through the personal finance thicket by a (male) adviser (for a price, of course). Meanwhile, all the data points to the opposite: men are more emotional about their money, trading stocks based on feelings, spending more, and so on. The real reason women often have less money than men (as Olen states, but SHOULD BE OBVIOUS): THEY EARN LESS THAN MEN FOR THE SAME WORK. For the love of God. Olen's blunt, obvious prescription: instead of telling women they're too weepy to understand an index fund, maybe we should be lobbying for gender equality and eliminating the gender wage gap!?

And there is more of this ilk. So, ultimately, a great book for this female economist called Frugal Angela, but also a great book for broader social issues of politics, income inequality, and our future. Oh yeah, and the only safe bet in navigating these stormy economic seas: buy bonds.

Bright, funny little spec fic. Puts a very meta, humorous spin on Godwin's Law.

SuperPACs are evil, and they will lead to our destruction. Also, the internet is awesome. The end. Hear, hear!

As usual, a series of fun and informative essays spanning the last year in science. These tended more towards human-centric stuff (Ariely's bent, as a social scientist), with some of the essays being no more than profiles of prominent scientists (interesting as they were!). As a social scientist and familiar with Ariely's work, I actually felt like I didn't learn too much with this collection. But it did push me a bit, and it was just plain interesting overall.

Another super durable book, lasting years - YEARS - in the bedtime reading rotation. A little kid's 1 year = an adult's decades. So this is really remarkable.

I hate it.

Edited to add: Omg. I don't know how it entered my head, but I have spent the last few years reading this book, convinced that Taro Gomi is an Israeli author and this was originally published in Hebrew. I'm telling you, I deeply believed this. I don't know why. Maybe I misread something on the inside flap. But I believed this so strongly, I often read this book being like, “so that's what an Israeli toilet looks like”, “I guess Israeli parenting is a lot more open-minded than American parenting, good for them”, and so on. I even found the English to be definitely translated or foreign-sounding... I was like, I guess it's just an Israeli accent. But Taro Gomi is Japanese!?!? My mind is turned upside down.

I stopped reading fiction about ten years ago, when I discovered non-fic books and realized that, omg, truth really is stranger than fiction. The Black Count is one such strange, incredible story.

This is a biography of Alexandre Dumas's dad, (also) Alex Dumas, who was the mixed race son of a cheeky French aristocratic lothario and a slave lady in Haiti, came to France, pwned everyone at fencing at his Fancy Teen Aristocrat Fencing School (or whatever it was called), became top general of everything, weathered the French Revolution (avoiding the guillotine, oh man), commanded the French cavalry in the disastrous Egypt Expedition under Napoleon, ended up imprisoned in a castle in Italy by some crazy Neopolitans, and was also super tall for that period (over 6 feet!) and had the ladies faintin'. He was that kind of super noble, super modest, super athletic dude that's the hero of many a film. So: amazing person. And: amazing time! For goodness sake, late 18th century France was OUTTA CONTROL. It's a miracle anyone survived that period, especially while getting promoted.

Oh yeah, Dumas (the son) is the guy who wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Reminder!

I imagine Dumas (the father) played by a beefed up Chiwetel Ejiofor. Seriously, someone needs to buy these film rights.

I was possessed by a fierce passion to mathify my kids recently. I am so appalled by the State of Math in the US. Specifically, the state of math in our culture. Math as something people either “get” or not. What fixed mindset nonsense! I was browsing around the various math camps (Russian School of Math, Art of Problem Solving, etc) and the websites - and parent forums - were full to the gills with baloney toxic language about “my gifted child” this and “for kids who love math” that. EX-SQUEEZE ME. Do we brand libraries as a place “for kids who love reading”? Sometimes. But mostly we're like YO WE ALL GOTTA LEARN TO LOVE READING. WE START TODAY. AT BIRTH. Why not the same with math?!

I don't want my kids to be GOOD at math. This is the key point! I want them to enjoy it. I want them to see it as a useful tool. They DON'T have to have any special talent for it. Just like they don't need to be like super speed readers. I just haaaate that people (girls especially!) are subtly taught that math is a horrible chore that only a chosen few can divine. Oh PUHLEEZE.

Anyway. AMA. So I bought like a gazillion books about how MATH IS NOT SCARY, IT'S TOTALLY FINE, and have aggressively put them into rotation. This one was enjoyable. A kid presses elevator buttons (relatable), stops at fantastical floors, and does some subtraction. THANK YOU. That's all we need.

Baby Brother is constantly ruining the meditative calm of preschool-age Big Brother, who clearly just wants to stack his blocks, would you leave him alone, for the love of God. Baby Brother uses tried-and-true strategies of (a) feigning helplessness and then (b) unleashing maximum charm (what a smile!). For this reason alone, deploy wisely with your children lest they learn these tricks of the trade.

Also features that historical contraption the “playpen” and not an adult in sight! Ah, a relaxing reminder of the pre-helicopter days. Also also features the best words in the English language: “NO, NO!” (complete with finger wag)