Category: Review

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Review

“Code That Fits in Your Head”

Mark Seemann

I thoroughly enjoyed this one — I think, in part, because I’ve read a fair few programming books already, so every time Seemann said “there’s a lot of good books on this topic, so I won’t rehash it, go read x or y” there were good odds I’d read one of his recommendations. It helped the whole thing feel better-paced as I was reading through it.

The core thesis of the book is right there in the title: you should be writing code that fits in your head. There’s a lot more detail about what exactly that means, but I also liked how he explained it: a little bit of “here’s some numbers you can use as heuristics, but the important part is that you understand the concept and get why I chose those numbers.” A lot less “here’s the rule,” a lot more “here’s why you should have a rule, and how to choose what exactly your rule should be.” Which makes a lot of sense — different codebases have different constraints and priorities, as do different languages. Just within my own everyday experience, the same amount of functionality often fits in half the number of lines of code when I go from Objective-C to Swift; using the same heuristics for both languages would either give ObjC frustratingly low limits, or Swift uselessly high ones.

Overall, quite a good read, and very approachable, as programming books go. Well worth 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

“A Short History of Canada”

Desmond Morton

I’m making a break from my usual rule of “if I didn’t like a book, I don’t write a review” because, for the most part, what I didn’t like about this book felt mostly like an issue of incorrect expectations.1 Because I came to this book after reading The Shortest History of Italy, and so I was expecting this to, similarly, cover all of the history of Canada. Admittedly, the title did encourage that assumption.

Rather than being a short history of Canada, this book was an exhaustive history of every vote held above the municipal level in Canada. The actual “history of Canada” part was left as the occasional bit of window-dressing, or as context for the recounting of which party won how many seats at the cost of which other parties. As an example of what this did to my ability to actually glean any knowledge about the history of Canada: so far as I can recall, the only mention of Canada adopting a Prohibition was a passing reference to Prohibition ending in Canada shortly after it did in the United States.2

So, like, if you already know Canadian history and want the political science professor’s take on it, this is the book for you. If you, like me, know next to nothing about the history of Canada… this won’t help.

  1. The one exception is Morton’s remarks about Y2K:
    > The world in the new millennium offered plenty of challenges. Despite mobilizing immense preparations and precautions, the so-called Y2K phenomenon was not one of them. Changing the date on millions of computers around the world from 12/31/99 to 01/01/00, insisted experts, would cause sudden massive breakdown on the countless machines that controlled everything from buses and aircraft to stock markets and hospital life-support systems. Essentially, nothing happened by dawn of New Year’s Day, 2000, beyond a worldwide illustration of technological hysteria. (V.5)
    This absolutely infuriated me. Arguing that, because the Y2K bugs were solved, they actually weren’t a challenge all along? That’s fundamentally misunderstanding how addressing problems works. ↩
  2. I think. It might’ve been before. I still don’t know, is the point. ↩
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Review

“The Shortest History of Italy”

Ross King

I’ve read a book or two on the Roman (and Byzantine) Empire, but my knowledge of the history of Italy basically covers the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, and then subsides into a quietly mumbled “and there was Van Gogh and they invented opera and some other stuff happened”, and then how World War II went for Italy, and then fades back out again. Seemed like it’d be worth filling in the middle bits more than that, which brought me to this book.

It did quite well at what the title says; it was a short history of Italy. Not a lot of depth to it, but it didn’t promise that, and instead delivered on being the brief overview that I wanted. An enjoyable read that set out with a goal in mind and met it well; check it out.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

“Tidy First?”

Kent Beck

A fairly quick read, and an interesting one. Structurally, I think this worked well as a book — there’s a flow to it, the sections lead from one to the next quite well — but it also does feel like, both in terms of size and of formatting of the larger section in the middle, like it could’ve been implemented as a deck of cards. Something like the Writer Emergency Pack, but for programmers.

I quite like the choice of the word ‘tidy’, though, which Beck spent some time explaining. In short, it’s meant to emphasize that it’s just a little change. This book isn’t about massive refactorings; it’s about moving a couple lines around so a function is easier to read, adding or removing a couple comments so that a new reader can easily understand what’s going on in this file, extracting a few lines into a helper function. Small changes, things that just take a moment and could, in theory at least, be a no-review-needed PR.1 Well worth the hour or two it takes to read; check it out.2

  1. A concept I’m not entirely sold on, still, but I may be biased by being the kind of person who enjoys reviewing PRs. ↩
  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

“Fallen”

Melissa Scott

This was a really fun setting; the cultural aesthetic of the dark ages, the knowledge that our civilization is less than it once was. But where, in the actual dark ages, the lost technologies of our forefathers were, like, Making Good Concrete and Building Aqueducts, in this book the lost technologies are things like “an artificial sun at the center of a miniature Dyson sphere” and “a man-made planetoid so near to its star that even with the energy shields keeping it livable, ships can only land on it for a couple hours every day.”

And I love that kind of thing. “Secrets of the ancients” is one of my favorite tropes, but this is very deliberately kept just on the near side of the “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” line. It feels like everything can be understood, like the knowledge is there to be found, tantalizingly within reach.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book; it took a conscious effort to put it down so I didn’t stay up all night reading, and I picked it up and finished it in the morning instead. Absolutely worth the read; check it out.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

“Price of a Thousand Blessings, Volume 2”

Ginn Hale

Did I buy the second book immediately after finishing the first, and read through the whole thing in the same day? Yes. Yes I did. I’m hoping that, by the time this gets posted, the third volume will be out, and seeing this scheduled post will remind me to go pick it up; as of this writing1 there’s only the two available. Fortunately for me, Volume 2 ended at a stable point, instead of on an extreme cliffhanger.

I think reading both books in close sequence like that helped the effect; lots of Volume 1 was establishing the world, which allowed Volume 2 to pull at the relationships between the characters, and play around with that existing knowledge of the world. This feels like a good one to avoid any further spoilers, though, so I think I’m going to stop there, and just tell you to go read it.2 Though, y’know, read the first book before you try this one; they’re so thoroughly interlinked that the chapter numbers in Volume 2 pick up where they left off at the end of Volume 1. This cannot be read on its own.

  1. Which can be used as a hint for how far in advance I’m writing these. ↩
  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

“Price of a Thousand Blessings, Volume 1”

Ginn Hale

I had two clear thoughts in my mind, early on in this book: first, that for the setting, I was picturing Republic City from The Legend of Korra; and second, that the main character’s approach to life reminds me of Sokka from The Last Airbender. While the latter could, conceivably, have been an actual influence, the more I read, the more that I thought the former was just that both were based on the same sort of “1920s New York aesthetic in a heavily Chinese-inspired locale.”

The whole book, really, leans heavily into that Chinese folklore feeling, and it’s absolutely delightful. There’s a strong sense of a weighty, and long, past behind everything. This is a world that has a rich history. It’s also a world that had a People’s Revolution and is now in a very modern-feeling “we’re the People’s Secret Police” sort of place. A different kind of weighty, that.

The protagonist works well, here; he was raised in a temple as a sort of indentured servant of the state, and sets him up for a sort of simultaneous cynicism and naïveté; he’s cynical about his place in the world, about the role of class in his life, but also utterly naïve about the inherent corruption of a secret police. To spoil something from very early on, he saves the day from a bombing, and not once does he come to the (to me) obvious conclusion that it was a plot by the secret police.

The setting also has some interesting mechanics going on: a magic system that works well for big cinematic setpieces, and Avatar-style Doing Magic With Martial Arts, but also feels thoroughly influenced by electromagnetic physics. A delightfully chaotic reincarnation-ish system, which creates some hilarious interactions between characters who either have or haven’t yet figured out that’s what’s going on.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It ends on a vicious cliffhanger, but I at least managed to wait long enough to read this one that the sequel is now out, so hopefully I’ll be reading it soon. Check it out.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

“Fair’s Point”

Melissa Scott

Decided to go right from Point of Dreams to the next in the series, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It hit the same kind of fun magical-setting mystery plotline as the previous, but spent more time developing the relationship between the main characters in a way that I enjoyed. It also helps that we got to see the incompetent fool from the last book be more incompetent and make more of a fool of himself; there’s a certain joy to schadenfreude.

One thing I’ve enjoyed in these books that I didn’t mention last time: there’s a subtle touch to the setting, whereby the default person is assumed to be female. Paraphrasing, as I didn’t copy down the exact quote, but there’s a scene where they’re discussing who’s been pulling off the mysterious heists, and the line is “‘. . . the woman who’s doing this.’ He paused. ‘Or man, I suppose.’”

And if you don’t think that’s a nice distinction to make, consider that I typed it backwards, despite very actively knowing what the point of it was; defaults matter.

A fun read; probably start earlier in the series, but if you’ve been following along, maybe you already have! Anyhow, here’s your link.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

“Point of Dreams”

Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett

This is, apparently, the third book in the series; of more surprise to me was the fact that I’ve apparently read the first, though I have no memory of doing so. I suspect it didn’t clear my tolerance for the fiction rule of thumb. This time, at least, I was interested enough to stick through the vocabulary, and wound up quite enjoying the book.

To sum up the general vibe of the book: queer fantasy police procedural. It’s very much a different world — the setting is vaguely Renaissance-flavored, but between the very present magic system, the different evolutionary path that language took, and the two suns, it’s pretty clearly not doing the alternate-history thing.

The murder mystery part was a bit slow to get started, but took off pretty well after that. There was a scene early on that read at the time as a fairly clearly Chekhov’s Gun, which paid off quite well, but in retrospect was also some excellent foreshadowing; I enjoy when a book pulls off something like that.

I also enjoyed… something I’m going to tuck into a footnote, as it contains spoilers.1

Overall, a fun read; check it out.2

  1. Seriously, spoilers about the murder weapon; skip this footnote if you want to go into the book without that foreknowledge.
    The use of magical flower arrangements as the murder weapon started off as an interesting concept, but became darkly comedic in light of this being a Magic Is A Known Thing fantasy-world. The general fact of them being able to go over to the university to consult with the Department of Magical Flowers makes it feel plausible within this world. The way that conversation went, though, was the funny part. Arriving at the (very real) Department of Magical Flowers to ask about magical flower arrangements. “No, there’s no such thing as magical flower arrangements. No, there’s simply no way that putting multiple magical flowers together could cause any sort of interaction or compound effect.” “Fine, fine, can you at least provide some input on the first murder? The one where it was a single magical flower?” “fake news” ↩
  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

“Luminescent Machinations”

edited by Rhiannon Rasmussen and Dave Ring

And here I am again, reading yet another anthology.1 I think this is the last one in my queue for a while. Ending on a pretty good note, though; while nothing leapt out at me quite as much as with Power to Yield, there’s also the benefit that nothing leapt out at me quite as much as with Power to Yield. Nothing extremely good, nothing deep and depressing.

The choice of “mecha” as a theme was interesting, and while most of them stuck with the classic Big Robot approach, I think every story did something interesting with it, and a few pulled the concept of mecha into a fantasy setting. Quite fun to read through all these different bite-sized pieces of worlds, wondering each time what they’re going to do to differentiate themselves. Delightfully, they all did.

I think my favorite goes to the one that felt the least “mecha” to me—Charles Payseur’s “The Demolition of Trucko Brahe”. There’s a bit of hinting at some giant robot fights, but the mecha here is a truck. A sentient alien truck, but a truck. This reminded me of Animorphs, really, though from a different angle. It’s a world that was clearly built around being a children’s show, but we’re looking at the aftermath. What happens after the war was won by heroic sacrifice, and the saviors of the galaxy get dropped back into the unaware world from which they came. It was sad, melancholy, and hopeful, all at once.

Overall, an enjoyable read; here’s your link.2

  1. Two in a row is already a lot, but it was, in point of fact, three; I just disliked the third one and so didn’t write a review. ↩
  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

“Power to Yield and Other Stories”

Bogi Takács

As with every anthology I read, my thoughts are a little mixed. Some of the stories I love, one or two I may hate, and everything in between. This one was net positive, I think. And, being by a single author instead of a mix, there’s more of a sense of ordering to the whole thing.

I absolutely loved Volatile Patterns. I’m always a fan of good worldbuilding, and this was a tour de force, a short story giving me so many fascinating glimpses into what feels like a very full world.

And here’s where the sequencing hits: part of what makes it a very full world is that it’s one entry in a larger collection about this shared world. So some of the details being hinted at are there to uncover, in other stories.

Power to Yield expands on that world. And while it left me some hope that, in the years after Power to Yield and before Volatile Patterns, the situation improved, it has a very… Omelas quality to it. That the utopian society I saw first was built upon something much darker.

Which is an effective arc, but I don’t think that I actually like it. There’s a pattern in our culture, thinking that for something to be “realistic” it has to be dark, grim, depressing. Treating those qualities as a necessary component of a story, rather than simply qualities that can be present or not, without that valence. A story can just be happy; fiction can give us utopian societies without necessitating that there be a twist, a darkness hidden beneath the candy-shell exterior. We can be hopeful. That’s allowed.

I did enjoy reading this collection, though, so I’ll have my usual Bookshop link here.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

“They Don’t Represent Us”

Lawrence Lessig

It makes sense as a structure for the book, but golly, opening with over a hundred pages of detailed explanation of everything wrong with the political system in the US at the moment sure was depressing. Took some work to make it through that.

The second half, though, which does a little bit of “in an ideal world, we could do X and Y…” and then immediately discards that as “but we live in the real world, so here’s A and B that we could actually achieve, and how” was a lot easier. Which isn’t to say easy, but campaign finance reform, for example, sure would be worth the effort.

This is an impressively non-partisan book, with a thoroughly non-partisan call to action. Because it isn’t about “these structural inequalities are benefiting one party to the detriment of the other,” it’s about “these structural inequalities are detrimenting the concept of democracy.” To echo my own personal bugbear, it’s not calling for ranked-choice voting because RCV would mean My Team would win; it’s calling for ranked-choice voting because RCV would mean politics would suck less. If the Other Team wins more, it’s still a net benefit, because it won’t be the primaried-in extremists of the Other Team, it’ll be the moderates that My Team can at least tolerate. And My Team’s primaried-in extremists would be having the same issue. We, the voters? We’d be getting representatives that actually represent our values — or, at least, the values of a majority, rather than the values of the primary voters of whichever team won that time around.

Well worth the read, even with that opening slog; check it out.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

“When Driving Is Not An Option”

Anna Letitia Zivarts

This was a fairly quick read, and one I thoroughly enjoyed. Zivarts does a good job of diving into the details without getting getting bogged down in them, and I’m particularly fond of the fact that, after the ‘conclusion’ chapter, there was an ‘action items’ chapter.

If I could pull out one factoid from this book that I think a lot more people should know, it’s this: roughly one in three Americans do not drive. Sometimes this is by choice, but frequently, it isn’t; roughly one in four Americans can not drive. And we as a country have spent a long time completely ignoring them, content in the fact that Everybody Knows that everyone can drive, right? Wrong.

Overall, a very good read, well worth the time; check it out.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

“How to Talk to a Science Denier”

Lee McIntyre

Quite frankly, my takeaway from this book is that I am not the right person to do the talking to science deniers. I spent a lot of this book absolutely infuriated that the people in his examples of science deniers are like that, and one of the key things to do, if you’re going to try to get through to them, is to not be incandescent with rage at them. Whoops.

If you’re less prone to trying to set people aflame with your mind, then you might find some value in this book. It’s worth a shot, anyways.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

“Why Nothing Works”

Marc J. Dunkelman

I’m of two minds about this book. It has definite positives—within the subtitle, “who killed progress—and how to bring it back,” it did a pretty good job of answering the first question.

The books thesis is that, within the ‘progressive’ movement, there’s two approaches to what should be done with power: the Hamiltonian, centralizing power, and the Jeffersonian, decentralizing it. The New Deal was Hamiltonian, creating agencies with sprawling powers to fix the problems facing the nation. But Robert Moses was also a Hamiltonian figure, who sure could get stuff done, but didn’t have much regard for if that stuff was worth doing. And so, in response to the failures of that Hamiltonian mode, we have the Jeffersonian, which I think is best embodied by the National Environmental Policy Act; it created an ability for individuals to block projects on the grounds that the environmental impacts were too great. Which, y’know, was quite often a good thing. But that same Jeffersonian approach has gotten us to where we are now, with the most expensive infrastructure projects in the world, because everyone can block everything, so every big project gets dragged through court time and time again.

My first issue is the degree to which the book discards the impact of people outside the progressive movement. Conservatives do, in fact, exist, and have frequently held both Congress and the Presidency. They’ve got a pretty solid lock on the judiciary of late, too. So acting as though the only source of this Jeffersonian gridlock is progressives is a bit irritating—especially since this same Hamilton/Jefferson divide can work just as well as a lens to examine conservative politics! It’s easy to equate the GOP’s “party of small government” stance with the Jeffersonian plan for power, but they have their Hamiltonian moments as well.

My second issue is the latter part of the subtitle, “how to bring it back.” Because that’s barely touched on at all. The conclusion has a bit of it, but by and large this book exists to point out the problem and state that, golly, we should really work on that. And, yes, there’s value to it; I’m a life-long progressive, but hadn’t ever thought of this ‘balance of power’ question, and now I’m aware of it and thinking about it. It’s perfectly fine for the book’s goal to be drawing attention to the issue, putting some framing around it so we can actually discuss it and figure out our approach to fixing it. But if that’s the goal, the subtitle is marketing it very wrong.

Still, though, I found it quite a useful piece of framing, and genuinely did find value in reading it. So, having spent most of the duration of this review talking about what I didn’t like about the book, I’m still going to recommend it. Worth reading.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. ↩