Category: Review

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Review

“The Art of the National Parks”

Fifty-Nine Parks

This is my first coffee table book, and I’m quite happy with it as a representative of the genre. I’ve been a fan of the Fifty-Nine Parks series for a while—I believe, in my apartment, there’s now one of every product in their line-up.1 It’s just a really beautiful art series, inspired by one of the most incredible things the United States has ever done.2 There’s also a definite influence from the old Works Progress Administration posters, at least spiritually so, and that’s another style that I absolutely love.3

Beyond just being a beautiful objet d’art, the book is also a great way to get an overview of what all those national parks are. I may well wind up using this thing as a reference tome, especially as I contemplate visiting some of these parks.

I really highly recommend the whole 59 Parks project. As I’m writing this, their print shop is closed for a few months yet, but their partners for various non-poster items are still selling various things.4

  1. Well, every product family, I don’t have every single poster. I’ve got posters, notebooks, and this book, and gave my roommate their board game at one point. ↩
  2. Citation: search r/AskReddit for any of the monthly “non-Americans: what’s one thing America does right?” threads. The national parks are always mentioned. ↩
  3. Citation: 9 out of the 11 posters in my apartment are in that “inspired by the WPA” style. ↩
  4. And, I can add, restocking—some of the Field Notes sets were sold out for a while, but they’ve since reappeared. I’m glad that Field Notes isn’t being strict with their definition of “Limited Edition”, or I’d’ve been very sad that I missed my chance to get the whole collection. ↩
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Review

“Irons in the Fire”

John McPhee

The human experience is fractal; everything you might be interested in, there’s an entire subcommunity somewhere of people who share that interest, and have explored it in great detail.1 McPhee has a talent for finding one of these fractal subcommunities, finding the right people in it to talk to, and then writing about his experience of exploring it in such a way that he can bring the reader along for the learning experience.

There’s a couple of that type of story in this book. The titular piece, Irons in the Fire, is about the cattle industry in Nevada—cattle branding, brand inspectors, rustlers, and ranchers. The kind of world that I’ve thought about approximately never, and wound up reading through in fascination. There’s also The Gravel Page, which reappears somewhat in Travels of the Rock, that’s all about forensic geology, and some of the ways that’s been used. The latter part of The Gravel Page feels like the spec script for an HBO special.

Then there’s Duty of Care, which has that same “this is a whole community I’d never even thought about” aspect, but really gets into environmentalism, too. Consider the tire: petroleum-based, worn down somewhat by use, but once discarded… where does it go? How can you recycle that?

Release reminded me of being in design school, contemplating the importance of accessibility technology. Absolutely dated in terms of the technology now available, of course, but these personal stories of how impactful they are are a great reminder.

Lastly in my review, though not in the order of the book, In Virgin Forest talks about old-growth forest, and how shamefully little of it there is left in the US.

I love a John McPhee book. I’ve got a pile of ‘em to read still, and I’m trying to space them out so I don’t wind up writing a whole series of reviews just on one author. It’s a real effort of will, I tell you. Having said all that, what am I gonna do, not recommend it? Of course not. Check out the book, it’s a cool introduction to several new areas of the fractal human experience.2

  1. For example, how much time do you spend thinking about the keyboard you use to type on? Personally, I put very little thought into it the vast majority of the time. I know some people, however, who are into keyboards, and have entire collections of keyboards, frequently build custom keyboards themselves, and have strong opinions about the visual design of keycaps and which type of spring mechanism to use. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Flash Fire”

TJ Klune

I mentioned in my review of the first book that opening with a salvo of self-insert fanfic is a powerful way to begin a book, and apparently the author agreed, because this one opens with a full-on broadside. And out of that cringe frying pan, and into the awkward fire of a teenager being caught, mid-makeout-session, by his dad. Oof.

Nick, the protagonist, remains categorically the best take on a teenager I’ve ever read. No other superhero media captures quite the degree of astonishingly bad decision-making provided by the average 16-year-old boy. Peter Parker has his one dramatic character moment early in every reboot, and then after that he’s a mature adult? I’m gonna need a story arc explaining that along with the walking on the ceiling, the spider bite also magically fixed the mess of hormones that is Being A Teen, because I refuse to believe how stupid he isn’t most of the time. Nick, though? Nick is an ongoing disaster, and it’s hilarious. I had to put the book down just to laugh, multiple times.

It helps that he’s got a good support network, because just about every character that’s there is wonderful. His friends are just as hilarious, the parents—and, good lord, I’m suddenly feeling my age as I write this—are very relatable as they roast their kids for the aforementioned very bad decision-making skills, and there’s a few new characters that show up partway through that make it just that much more fun.

I picked this up within a week of finishing the last one, which I highly recommended, and I’m gonna highly recommend this one too. My biggest complaint is that it’s the second of three books, and the story arc has a distinctive Empire Strikes Back feel of “oh, this isn’t getting wrapped up well by the end of the book, is it” throughout. But then, I picked up the third book at the same time I was grabbing the second, so it turns out I’m pretty well-prepared for that.1

I loved this book as much as I did the first one. Obviously, start with the first book, but, y’know, go ahead and grab the second too.2

  1. That isn’t the only parallel to cinema that’s present in the meta-level; the book also has a post-credits sting that hit me like a truck, in the same way that some of the Marvel end-credits scenes just locked me in for watching the next one in the franchise. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Byzantium: The Early Centuries”

John Julius Norwich

I’ve realized recently that there’s a whole lot of history that I know basically nothing about. Prior to reading this book, the extent of my knowledge of the Byzantine Empire was “I think it used to be the Roman Empire, and then when the Roman Empire collapsed, part of it stuck around for a while? And then in the last century they renamed Constantinople to Istanbul,” and then after that some confused muttering that reveals I wasn’t even clear on the distinction between the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire.

Anyhow, someone mentioned that they were reading this series, and I thought I’d check it out. I’m certainly not a historian, but I can at least be a little better-informed than I’d been previously! Though, honestly, despite this being the first of the trilogy, I feel like I started much too late in the story. Turns out that the successor state to the Roman Empire requires a lot of context on how the Roman Empire works that I, unsurprisingly, also don’t have! So at some point I suppose I’ll go in search of a similar high-level overview of Roman history, backfill more of my knowledge.

Frankly, I don’t expect to retain much of the detail here. This is a few hundred pages covering hundreds of years of history; you can’t get a detailed overview at that density, and thanks to the inability of royalty to have unique names, it’s all a horrific muddle to try to keep track of regardless. I’m fairly certain there was an entire dynasty who never named a child anything that wasn’t a variation of “Justinian” or “Constantine,” and that just seems like a great way to give a kid a complex.

Still, I’ve got a bit more high-level overview, which is what I wanted going in. At some point, I’ll dive back in and pick up the second of the trilogy, but at least for the moment, I think I need to give my brain a break and go read something with a lot fewer facts… and a lot fewer horrific slaughters. I don’t recommend against this book, but… maybe see if your local library has a copy, rather than trying to buy it.

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Review

“Crimson Son”

Russ Linton

This was an interesting midpoint between “superhero novel about the superhero” and “superhero novel about someone completely unrelated to the superheroes.” (The latter is, honestly, pretty rare, and I think there’s more room for it to be explored as a concept. Agents of SHIELD is also somewhat on this line.) Spencer, the protagonist, certainly isn’t a superhero, being entirely powerless, but he’s also not not involved. His dad is the Superman archetype, and Spencer, being the obvious weak point, is… trapped in a secret bunker somewhere in the Arctic Circle.

The backstory of that bunker made me very happy, though—it’s not just “random bunker because Cold War,” it’s specifically explained later in the book that it was part of a network of those bunkers built by the Soviet Union… because in this world, as best as I can tell, the entire realm of “nuclear” just never happened. World War II ended with a strike team of superhumans; Chernobyl was a superhuman run amuck; the Cold War weapons race was both sides developing more and more superhumans.

Which is just a delightful twist. “They invented superheroes during World War II, but nothing else changed”? Tired. “They invented superheroes during World War II, and now all sorts of major historical events went differently because The Ultimate Weapon is now a superhero instead of a nuke”? Wired.1

And, really, the book just builds on that. The title works really well—the whole book, really, is about the legacy of that Cold War weapons development. Not just that there’s other supers out there, but that the governments had some programs officially trying to wind down the whole arms race… and that they weren’t entirely honest about how it all went.

It’s a really interesting take on the genre that I’ve read a whole lot of, and I quite enjoyed it. Definitely worth a read.2

  1. I think my favorite one of these was that, in this universe, there were no planes on 9/11; instead, there was a superhuman fielded by a terrorist organization, created using leaked Cold War superhuman tech. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Greylady”

Peter Morwood

I went into this expecting it to feel more like a Diane Duane novel, which entirely wasn’t the case. (For context, they’re married—that wasn’t an entirely random thought to have.) Instead, it felt like a storyteller; the plot didn’t quite line up in the way I expect from a novel, but I think it works fairly well as a story being told to a great hall full of revelers.

There’s a couple odd spots, still—near the beginning, a couple chapters from a different character’s perspective, and I kept expecting to go back to them, but they never reappeared. And, towards the end, a skip forward in time that feels like it’s glossing over a lot of things that happened. This is listed as “Book 1” in the series, but I feel like, in the interest of closure, the last chapter was actually borrowed from the end of Book 2 instead.

Those issues aside, I quite enjoyed the book. The prose flows in a way that, again, feels like a story teller in a way; there’s a rhythm to it throughout. I’m still a bit unclear on the system of magic—there’s a distinction between sorcerers and wizards, but I still couldn’t tell you which was which—but that feels like just a mixing of words, and the actual system feels reasonably clear.1 And I appreciated that, while it doesn’t wrap up every thread, and actually specifically starts up some new ones at the end, it still came with enough of a sense of closure on the story that it felt complete. It’s the start of a series, but I don’t feel cheated out of anything by having only read the first one so far.

All in all, this was a good read, and a fairly approachable fantasy novel. Give it a read.2

  1. Which, again, very different from Duane’s works—in here, it’s clearly a ‘soft magic’ system, whereas the Young Wizards series has a fairly hard magic system, with very clear rules and functionality… that can still occasionally bend for the betterment of the plot. But then, in-universe, that kind of thing still makes sense, because the reader isn’t the only outside force looking in, and the others are able to influence things more directly. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“The House on Mango Street”

Sandra Cisneros

“I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much.”

I think I’ve read this before, many years ago. It feels like the kind of book that was assigned in school, tied up in analysis and the attempt to make a child understand things that they can’t understand until they’ve understood the world a bit more. I’m certain that I didn’t appreciate it then; I’m not sure that I appreciate it now. Not really, not the way it feels like it deserves to be appreciated.

But more of it made sense this time than it did last time. Maybe I’ll come back and read it again in another ten years, and maybe then more of the book will fit into the spaces in my head.

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Review

“Extraordinaries”

TJ Klune

Starting with an excerpt from the egregious self-insert fanfic that your protagonist is writing sure is a powerful opening. Imagine getting hit by a fully-loaded semi truck, carrying exclusively cringe. A bold statement, which nearly got me to put the book back down again; my high school experience was bad enough on its own, and I’ve never felt the need to relive it while adding extra awkwardness.

That said, I managed to convince myself to power through, and I’m glad I did. I have to give bonus points to whoever picked the tagline on the cover—“Some people are extraordinary. Some are just extra.”—because it really explains what the protagonist is like. He’s extra. He’s also the most authentically high school character I’ve read in a while, because oh my god is he an idiot. Most of the plot of the book is “him failing to notice very obvious things, and coming up with incredibly stupid plans.”

What makes the book is his friends. Gibby is positively delightful—she spends most of the book, fully in the know on everyone’s secrets, and mostly using that to laugh at everyone instead of actually helping. A quote:

“Yes,” Gibby breathed. “Yes to this. Yes to all of it. Oh my god, yes. This is so stupid. I can’t wait. White people are freaky.”

She’s living her best life.

The other thing that kept me interested in the book was that I couldn’t quite figure out all the secret identities. There’s just enough twisting to keep you wondering up until the book decides it’s time for you to know, and while it was fun to sit there in the knowledge of how well I’d narrowed down the pool of options while Nick—the protagonist—hadn’t actually figured out there was a pool of options, it was also fun to be unsure.

I enjoyed the heck out of this book. It took me a bit to get into it, because wow is the poorly-written fanfic at the start a tough sell, but once it got its hooks in I couldn’t put it down. Give it a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Doors of Perception”

Aldous Huxley

Huxley is the kind of author I’ve tended to shy away from, entirely based on Brave New World. Dystopian science fiction, popular with literature teachers? Nope, not for me. So I was a bit wary of this, going in, but after a few pages I realized that what I was reading was nonfiction, and nonfiction with a very interesting writing style at that.

I actually found myself collecting quotes as I read, along with ideas. I quite liked his semi-utopian vision of a future where we’ve replaced alcohol’s role in society with something like a short-lived mescaline derivative. No hangover, no belligerent drunkenness, just a feeling of being one with the world and experiencing something greater than yourself? Sounds pretty neat! Shame we went all “war on drugs” instead.

Some of the quotes just hit me with a sense of poetry:

In a few minutes we had climbed to a vantage point in the hills, and there was the city spread out beneath us. Rather disappointingly, it looked very like the city I had seen on other occasions. So far as I was concerned, transfiguration was proportional to distance. The nearer, the more divinely other. This vast, dim panorama was hardly different from itself.

Others just made me laugh:

An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World’s Biggest Drug Store safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as “being in one’s right mind.”

I also, being the big fan of Snow Crash that I am, liked some of the discussion about words-as-symbols, and the inability of symbols to be the real thing:

This may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are forever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

Another one that felt like a reference, this time to Timeheart in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series:

In other words, precious stones are precious because they bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.

And the discussion of art was just marvelous throughout. I want a museum setting of this book, walking you through his discussion of each piece as you walk by the piece itself.

The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are rediscovered by every succeeding generation, its values reassessed, its meetings redefined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations. Out of the same documents and monuments and works of art, every epoch invents its own Middle Ages, its private China, its patented and copyrighted Hellas. Today, thanks to recent advances in the technology of lighting, we can go one better than our predecessors. Not only have we reinterpreted the great works of sculpture bequeathed to us by the past, we have actually succeeded in altering the physical appearance of these works. Greek statues, as we see them illuminated by a light that never was on land or sea, and then photographed in a series of fragmentary close-ups from the oddest angles, beat almost no resemblance to the Greek statue seen by art critics and the general public in the dim galleries and decorous engravings of the past.

. . .

This may be bad art history, but it is certainly enormous fun.

One more block quote, because the final line really reminded me of Saturn by Sleeping At Last:1

A single candle, as Caravaggio and Spaniards had shown, can give rise to the most enormous theatrical effects. But Latour took no interest in theatrical effects. There is nothing dramatic in his pictures, nothing tragic or pathetic or grotesque, no representation of action, no appealed to the sort of emotions, which people go to the theater to have excited and then appeased. His personages are essentially static. They never do anything; they are simply there in the same way in which a granite Pharaoh is there, or a bodhisattva from Khmer, or one of Piero’s flat-footed angels. And the single candles used, and every case, distress this intense but un-excited, impersonal thereness. By exhibiting common things in an uncommon light, its flame makes manifest the living mystery and inexplicable marvel of mere existence.

Rather a long review, courtesy of the many quotes, but at the end I think all I’ve got to say is that I enjoyed it. Get a paperback copy; this is the kind of book that really wants to be perused on the couch on a rainy day, pen and paper available for jotting notes. Give it a go.2

  1. Specifically the line — “how rare and beautiful it is to even exist” ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“In Deeper Waters”

F.T. Lukens

I picked this book up from a Pride shelf at a used bookstore—and yes, that’s a bit of a peek into how much of a book backlog1 I have at any given time, given that this is getting published a month before Pride. And really, I grabbed it because it looked kinda cheesy.

And hey, guess what, it kinda was! But in a way that’s exactly what I wanted from it, exactly what I’d hoped it would be. It’s a cheesy little YA romance novel, with a bunch of high fantasy going on as the backdrop, and I’m so, so glad that things like this exist. Because boy, am I ever tired of the plot of an LGBTQ novel being that They Are LGBTQ. Once or twice, that’s an okay plot, but after that, it’s just repetitive. In this, it’s not at all a thing; from the beginning, Tal’s big brother is absolutely accepting of his bisexuality. The only way it appears at all is that it gives him a broader range of options to embarrass his little brother with by asking if they’re his type.

There’s a post somewhere out there where somebody rips into homophobia in fantasy and science fiction. The gist of it is, ‘you can imagine {insert fantasy trope} but you can’t imagine people not being assholes?’

That’s what this is. Someone said “y’know what, I’m making an entirely fictional setting. Why would I bring that aspect of reality into it? How would that make the story better?”

The cover art is very pastel, and so is the book. For all that there is an actual plot to it, I came to the end feeling like I’d had a hug. This book is kind. I loved it. Go read it.2

  1. A booklog, if you will. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Overcoming Bias”

Tiffany Jana & Matthew Freeman1

This may be the first time I’ve read one of these business books and not had the thought “yeah, this could’ve been a pamphlet.” Whoever edited it did a great job, presumably ruthlessly cutting out all the unnecessary parts, and the result is a lean, clean read.

The backstory of the authors—they’re married and co-own a company that basically consists of the two of them going around running corporate workshops on the topic of overcoming bias—helps it make a lot of sense, actually. This might not be a book that’s been edited down to the right point; it might be the rough script they use for their workshop sessions, expanded out from bullet points on a notecard to a book form. And from that perspective, it’s also done very well; they added just enough storytelling without getting bogged down, and make their points very well.

And, aside from that, it contains one of the best paragraphs I’ve ever read:

But just as we have told countless white people we have worked with, “by the power vested in us (by virtue of Tiffany’s negritude and our combined dedication to racial reconciliation), we hereby absolve you of your white guilt.” Now don’t get all excited and start throwing around slurs and crazy talk. We are just saying that we are fully aware that you did not personally create racism.“

Beautiful. I don’t know that I have ever read anything as hilariously, brutally honest about the concept of white guilt as “by the power vested in us (by virtue of Tiffany’s negritude)”. Just impeccable.

This is the most glowing review I think I’ve ever written of something that’s categorized as a “business book,” and I stand by it. This book feels like it can be useful as an introduction to diversity, as well as a useful reference material as you continue to learn more. Check it out.2

  1. Formatting- and voice-wise, I’d say Matthew was the primary author of this, with editing and interjections by Tiffany, but the fact that her name is alphabetically first is one of those “it is what it is” kinds of things. The fact that it then shows up in places as being written by “Tiffany Jana et al.”, though, that is hilarious. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Clean Coder”

Robert Martin

Another book club book from work—and no, we’re not going through them that fast, I just forgot to write up the previous one until a while after the fact.

This one has a lot less to do with code style and a lot more to do with the career aspects of being a programmer. The subtitle, actually, does a great job of explaining it: “A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers.” Less “write small chunks of code,” more “show up on time—you may think it doesn’t matter, but it does.” Martin does a great job of switching between giving advice and telling stories that explain how, exactly, he learned that painful lesson. It’s an effective technique—gives it a bit more of a storytelling flow, which helps the book maintain interest. Plus, humans are the storytelling ape; we’ve built entire religions around the idea of using stories to convey a message or impart some wisdom. He’s joining a proud tradition.

I found it a quite useful book, and as I’m writing this in advance of the book club discussion instead of weeks later, I’m looking forward to the discussion with my coworkers. Should be interesting. For now, let me put my opinion of the book like so: this should be required reading for every CS undergraduate program. Maybe hand it out with the diploma? It’s a whole lot of useful advice about the parts of the job that school doesn’t cover. If you’re new to the field, or even if you aren’t, I heartily recommend it. Check it out1—and, if you’ve got an O’Reilly membership, it’s available there as well.

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Lessons in Chemistry”

Bonnie Garmus

I’m a little tempted to include a chart of my progress in this book over time; talk about a hockey stick.

The first third of the book or so is just brutal. I remember seeing someone online say that they’d just read the book recently and found it a quick, light read, and thinking to myself what the hell book were you reading? Because the first part of the book is anything but light and quick. It’s a litany of all the micro- and macro-aggressions a woman faced in the 1950s, trying to be a chemist. 1 And there’s something of a Murphy’s Law feel to it, too, because not only is she dealing with the rampant sexism, but everything else that can go wrong, does.

I spent the first month of trying to read the book caught up in that. I could only make it through a chapter or two at a time, and then I needed a break; it was just so disheartening, so crushing.2

But roughly a third of the way through, it finally turns a corner, and that’s where I switched from plodding through out of a sense of obligation from highly it was recommended to me to “oh, shoot, I need to put the book down so I can get some sleep tonight.” The light appears at the end of the tunnel, the tragic backstory is established, and now we can get into her actually doing things the way she wants instead of being entirely overpowered.

And from then on out, the book is amazing. It’s full of little bits of comedy that are just perfectly executed; perspective shifts and timeline hops all over and only once was I even briefly confused by the combination. The world is still the same one that gave her the tragic backstory, but now it’s being changed for the better, and it’s a happier timeline than the one we’re in.3

So now, here I am, recommending this book as highly as it was recommended to me. It’s really tough at first, but the payoff is so very worth it. Give it a read.4

  1. Or rather, trying to do her work as a chemist while everyone around her tried to stop her—she absolutely is a chemist, just one facing far more obstacles than anyone else in the building. ↩
  2. And these aren’t long chapters, either. ↩
  3. I mean, I can’t guarantee that the 2023 of her world would be better than ours, but I can’t help but think that a world where the housewives of the 1950s had a robust education in chemistry and feminism courtesy of daytime TV would wind up in a better place than we are now. At very least we’d probably be a few decades ahead on the “stop consuming weird preservatives” thing. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby”

Sandi Metz

We’ve got a bit of a book club going at work, and this was the first read. We were inspired to read it by a conference talk she gave, where she went through the Gilded Rose kata and very clearly demonstrated the joys of refactoring well-tested code. Metz is a great communicator, and I highly recommend that talk as an entry point to her work.

This book, referred to as “POODR”, continues in the same style of “here’s some techniques you can use to write better code.” And, for the most part, it’s an excellent resource in that regard! Frankly, my only issues with it come down to Ruby not being my taste in languages, and it’s not as if I went into the book not knowing that it’d be in Ruby.

The largest chapter is on writing tests; compared to the rest, it looks rather intimidating. That said, I wound up skimming a lot of it—despite the assertion, earlier in the book, that type systems just add overhead and slow developers down, the majority of the chapter on testing is devoted to writing tests that… ensure you’ve got a type system. I remain unsold on these untyped/duck-typed languages; over here in Swift, I get all those unit tests for free, and the compiler forces me to run them every time I try to build. The time I spend writing tests is entirely spent writing tests for the business logic, not on making sure that I forgot a required method in a subclass.

Duck-typing also requires more faith in your fellow programmer—or even your future self—than I actually have. There’s a great description in the book of implicit object hierarchies, which struck me as being a beautiful academic concept, but will fall apart the moment the project gets larger than “a single developer, working on it continuously.” Add another developer, and they then have to read through the entire codebase to be sure they’ve got enough information to grasp those implicit types; take a break for a month, and you’ve got to reread it all to get back to the same place. And there’s no guarantee that the reading of everything will get you back to the same mindset that you had earlier, so those implicit types fall part pretty quickly. If you want to communicate an idea like that, you have to write it down—and why bother writing a comment when you can write that mental model into the code itself, and have the compiler check that it’s still being followed?

Don’t get me wrong, as I sit here writing only the things I didn’t like about the book. On the whole, I greatly enjoyed it, and found it full of useful ideas! It’s simply the way of human brains to engage more when we disagree than when we agree.

So, if you’re someone who spends time writing code, I do highly recommend this book. Just, y’know, keep in mind that it says Ruby on the cover, and Ruby has opinions about a few things that you may not agree with. You can get the book from its website, or if you (or your employer) have an O’Reilly subscription, it should be available in that library.

Categories
Review

“The Stories” [2/2]

A continuation of my previous post, where I started but didn’t finish reviewing a massive, 5,000-page anthology of short stories collected by the science fiction publisher Tor. There’s a longer explanation in that previous one; here, I’m finishing my list of stories that caught my interest, with links to where you can read them (free!) online.

  • Fire Above, Fire Below by Garth Nix. Garth Nix’s writing always reminds me of his Seventh Tower series, which I absolutely loved as a kid.1 Which has nothing to do with this story, but it’s still what came to mind.
  • Four Horsemen, at Their Leasure by Richard Parks. At this point, I think Terry Pratchett pretty definitively owns the idea of Death as an anthropomorphized entity. And this fits right into that style—theologically very different from the Discworld mythos, and a great deal emptier, but the idea of Death arguing with God? That’s still very Pratchett.
  • Silver Linings by Tim Pratt. This can’t not be an allegory about nuclear proliferation. Given that nuclear proliferation is one of my biggest worries, how could I not enjoy the story?
  • Clockwork Fairies by Cat Rambo. Rambo did a great job of writing this, because the protagonist is, very deliberately, the single most unlikeable person I’ve ever had to share a perspective with. He’s got that same “terrible in an entirely believable way” thing going on that made Umbridge such an iconic villain.
  • The Cairn in Slater Woods by Gina Rosati. I wasn’t actually expecting this story to go the way it did—I was really thinking it was gonna go, like, “the other school in the neighborhood is for the local vampires” or something silly.
  • Loco by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. This feels like a weird cross between Girl Genius and Livewires and I’m… kinda here for it?2
  • Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson. There’s a definite Ender’s Game thing going on here, with the whole “managing a war, lots of training simulations, one sibling is preternaturally good at it” aspect. But the way it’s turned and twisted is quite fun.
  • After the Coup by John Scalzi. I’m a frequent reader of the “humanity, fuck yeah!” type of story, and this feels like that genre at its absolute best. It isn’t about how great humanity is, unstoppable war machine or whatever; it’s about what people are really like. It’s comical in the best of ways.
  • The President’s Brain is Missing by John Scalzi. It was at this point that I decided I should probably put Scalzi on my “get some of his full books and read them” list, because this was just as much fun to read as the previous one.
  • Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue by John Scalzi. Another entry for the “Terry Pratchett would be proud” category. This feels like a slightly darker take on Guards, Guards!3
  • A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon by Ken Scholes. I’ve just now realized what this makes me think of—the Septimus Heap series. An old-fashioned world, with a bit of real magic… that just so happens to be the things built back when magic was just science.
  • Do Not Touch by Prudence Shen. I really like the idea that paintings have those “Do Not Touch” signs not because it’ll damage the ink, but because the curators are tired of diving into the paintings after the kids there on field trips.
  • Overtime by Charles Stross. After the amount of Doctor Who they’ve all seen, nobody should be surprised that the British continue to produce time-travel paradoxes.
  • Down on the Farm by Charles Stross. That said, I’m actually really enjoying this “Laundry” setting, and may need to go read one of the bigger books. It feels like it’s partially addressing one of my issues with Warehouse 13—namely, that any government organization dealing with Weird Crap like that should have a much bigger bureaucracy.45
  • A Tall Tail by Charles Stross. You could maybe write a story that’s more precisely up my alley, but to do so you’d have to take one of those AI models and train it exclusively on my interests for a few years. This sent me off on multiple searches to find out if historical things mentioned actually existed and I’d just missed them, or they were made up for the story.6
  • The Dala Horse by Michael Swanwick. Very much in the style of a northern European folk tale, but with a setting where the magic is a result of having built and then forgotten how to build a whole lot of very big, very powerful technologies.
  • The Mongolian Wizard by Michael Swanwick. The starter of a whole series—which, as I found out when grabbing the link, continued on after what’s in the ebook, so I’ve got some further reading for myself—of a very magical take on something of a World War.
  • What Doctor Gottlieb Saw by Ian Tregillis. Recommended reading prior to this: “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies”. Because this is, for sure, a story about what happens when you create a superintelligence without thinking in advance about what and how.
  • The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For A Little While by Catherynne M. Valente. A less young-adult version of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which I’ve mentioned before as one of my favorite series.
  • The Last Son of Tomorrow by Greg van Eekhout. A lot of similarity to the ending of Superman: Red Son, what with the examination of “hang on, what does Superman do when he notices that he’s immune to aging?”
  • A Stroke of Dumb Luck by Shiloh Walker. Another entry in the “vampires and werewolves are just kinda fun” category, with bonus points for a good balance between “actual consequences” and “oh god you’re such a teen about how to deal with this situation.”
  • Super Bass by Kai Ashante Wilson. The moment in the book (here, thousands of pages in, yes) where I realize how overwhelmingly white/european everything else in the book has been. A reminder that I want to get further out of my comfort zone with what I read, because a lot of the stuff out there, like this, is really good. Very, very different from what I’m used to, and I feel like I’m missing a whole lot of cultural context, but I can muddle my way through and still enjoy it.
  • The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree by Michael Swanwick. I’m very slowly working my way through Lessons in Chemistry at the moment, and this very much reminded me of that at the beginning, to the point that I spent the whole story bracing myself for the betrayal that never came. Instead, this was a bittersweet, paradoxical work that I found myself really loving.
  • The Sigma Structure Symphony by Gregory Benford. Between the wonderful description of a Lunar colony developed around archiving SETI transmissions from a busy, busy galaxy and the exploration of music as mathematics (and mathematics as music), there’s no way this wasn’t making it onto my list.
  1. And, honestly, still enjoyed rereading a couple years ago—it’s great fodder for a “this is a work of fantasy, but how can I turn it into far-future science fiction?” thought experiment. Hint: it involves a globe-spanning swarm of nanobots running a virtual world. ↩
  2. > “Not much like Patel,” mused Becka. > “I can’t say,” replied Gordo. “Remember, I only joined your team after the Patel incident.”

    > “I wish you’d stop bitching about ‘the Patel incident.’”

    > “Look,” said Gordo, “you can’t just morph a federal scientist into a giant invertebrate that catches fire. That’s not an acceptable protocol.” ↩

  3. > It is said that earthquakes are what happens when two night dragons love each other very much. ↩
  4. > Call me impetuous (not to mention a little bored) but I’m not stupid. And while I’m far enough down the management ladder that I have to squint to see daylight, I’m an SSO 3, which means I can sign off on petty cash authorizations up to the price of a pencil and get to sit in on interminable meetings, when I’m not tackling supernatural incursions or grappling with the eerie, eldritch horrors in Human Resources. ↩
  5. Although, that said, Warehouse 13 did feature an org chart that consisted of a handful of agents, a manager, the CEO, her personal driver, a contractor of a doctor, and then a board of directors that outnumbered the entire rest of the organization, so maybe they do have a healthy amount of bureaucracy… ↩
  6. I shouldn’t have doubted myself; all the things that I went “wait, is that real? How have I never heard of that?” were, in fact, fictional. Or, I guess, are still classified. ↩