Books Reviewed 2015

Here is  housekeeping post, collecting all the books reviewed here in 2015.

Looking back at this list, I see that this year saw Terry Pratchette’s last book (a wrenching experience), and new novels by old favorites Stross, Perry, Macguire, Holt, Gaiman, among others. I also read older but still good histories by Goodwin and Graeber. I read several books about banking, Papal and otherwise, and overlapping works about Italy, fictional and (supposedly) real.

Over the year, I reviewed a sampling of important books about contemporary digital life, including cryptocurrency, the “sharing economy”, social media, and “mind change”.   These works covered a spectrum from enthusiasm to dark worry, giving us much to think about. There are many more I did not have time or energy for. (I will say more on this topic in another post)

Throughout 2015 I continued my ongoing investigation of the question, “what is coworking?”, including reviews of two recent (self published) books about coworking by practitioners. (More on coworking in another post.)

Shall I name some “Best Books” out of my list? Why not?

Fiction:

There were so many to pick from. I mean, with Neil Gaiman in the list, how can I choose? But let me mention two that are especially memorable

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Very imaginative and well written, and, for once, not so horribly dark. This book lodged in my memory more than others that are probably equally good.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Published a few years ago, but I didn’t read it until this year. A wonderful, intricate story. The flight of the parrot is still in my memory.

Nonfiction:

There were many important works about digital life, and I shall try to comment on them in another post. But three books that really hit me are:

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
From several years ago, but I didn’t read it until this year. Highly influential on the ‘occupy’ and other left-ish thinking. This is an astonishingly good book, and long form anthropology, to boot. Wow!

Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
An exlectic little self-published book about “home coworking”, which I didn’t know was a thing. Kane walked the walk, and made me think in new ways about community and coworking.

Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by Sam Maggs
Unexpected amounts of fun reading this short book. It does an old, graying nerd no end of good to see that at least some of the kids are OK. Really, really, OK.

List of books reviewed in 2015

Fiction

A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias
After Alice by Gregory Maguire
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson
Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
Chasing the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick
Candy Apple Red by Nancy Bush
Chicks and Balances edited by Esther Friesner and John Helfers
Corsair by James L. Cambias
Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright
Diaspora by Greg Egan
Distress by Greg Egan
Electric Blue by Nancy Bush
Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry
Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong
Get In Trouble by Kelly Link
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear
Koko the Mighty by Kieran Shea
Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald
Mort(e) by Robert Repino
Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Rebirths of Tao by Wesley Chu
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Shark Skin Suite by Tim Dorsey
String of Beads by Thomas Perry
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine ed. by Jonathan Strahan
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Enchantment Emporium by Tanya Huff
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
The Fortress in Orion by Mike Resnick
The Future Falls by Tanya Huff
The Good, the Bad, and The Smug by Tom Holt
The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray
The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley
The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Wild Ways by Tanya Huff
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
Ultraviolet by Nancy Bush
We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler
Witches Be Crazy by Logan J. Hunder
Zer0es by Chuck Wendig

Non Fiction

Arrival of the Fittest by Andreas Wagner
Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper
Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy by Sam Maggs
God’s Bankers by Gerald Posner
LaFayette in the Somewhat United States by Sarah Vowell
Let’s Be Less Stupid by Patricia Marx
Live Right and Find Happiness by Dave Barry
Merchants in the Temple by Gianluigi Nuzzi
Mind Change by Susan Greenfield
Mindsharing by Lior Zoref
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
No More Sink Full of Mugs by Tony Bacigalupo
Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling
Pax Technica by Phillip N. Howard
Peers, Inc by Robin Chase
Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
Speculative Everything by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Age of Cryptocurrency by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney
The Next Species by Michael Tennesen
The Reputation Economy by Michael Fertik and David C. Thompson
The Social Labs Revolution by Zaid Hassan
The Ugly Renaissance by Alexander Lee
Twentyfirst Century Robot by Brian David Johnson
Women of Will:  Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays by Tina Packer

 

Book Reviews

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Books Reviewed Third Quarter

Books Reviewed Third Quarter

A bit of housekeeping:  here is a list of all the book reviews that appeared in this blog in Q3 2015.  Mostly new or recent releases, with a few old but good thrown in.

Fiction

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen
Chasing the Phoenix by Michael Swanwick
Chicks and Balances edited by Esther Friesner and John Helfers
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman 
Koko the Mighty by Kieran Shea
Secondhand Souls by Christopher Moore  
The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume Nine ed. by Jonathan Strahan
The Good, the Bad, and The Smug by Tom Holt
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley 
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu 
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis 

Non fiction

Reimagination Station: Creating a Game-Changing In-Home Coworking Space by Lori Kane
Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper
Let’s Be Less Stupid by Patricia Marx
Mind Change by Susan Greenfield 
Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
Peers, Inc by Robin Chase
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin 
The Art of Forgery by Noah Charney
The Next Species by Michael Tennesen 

 

Book Review: “Book of Numbers” by Joshua Cohen

Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen

I don’t know what to make of this book.

It’s certainly not a simple story, or even several stories. That would require some sort of beginning and ending, which is hard to discern.

There is a central character, with the same name as the author, and (in an exhaustively explored plot point), also the same name as a billionaire who hires him to ghost write his/their biography. Whose life are we telling? It is very confusing.

The stories of the family, friends, coworkers, and even chance encounters of one of the JCs are also recounted. I’m sure that the complex, overlapping stories, and confusions about what has happened is intentional. Life is messy, things cannot always be told as a simple story, we do not even always understand our own stories. I get it.

Still, if you are going to tell me a story, it would be nice to do it in a way I can understand.

The complex plotting and the indecipherable personalities of the characters are exacerbated by deliberately muddled writing. The author uses several voices to distinguish different people telling their version (though who is writing what is mostly up to the reader to figure out). Furthermore, he deliberately provides realistically messy text, as would be typed, dictated, or possibly hand written. This stylistic choice makes the reading much, much more difficult and, in some places, unpleasant. We get dozens of pages of ungrammatical blog postings, hundreds of pages of faux transcripts apparently from the dictation by a semiliterate tech billionaire (if I ever “as like” see the words “as like” again, I may scream), and hundreds of pages of “first draft” with strike outs, broken sentences, and misspellings.

It is hard to read, and goes on a long time.

As to the stories themselves. Well, there are a half dozen or more, I didn’t count. One story recounts the early days of the Web, fictionalizing the birth of a Google-like entity. This story is loosely based on history, but certainly is not factual. (His “learned” discussion of “search” is gobblygook. Please.) But Cohen isn’t trying for history, he’s trying to describe the “vibe”, and he’s not so far off on that. But still, this mush is not satisfying if you actually were part of it for real. It was both more and less weird than he tells.

He carries the tech story forward to a fictionalized NSA/Snowden/Wikileaks tale, which is even less satisfying. He seems to be working from news accounts, which are not exactly complete or accurate accounts. Here we have fiction derived from media accounts, which were based on “leaks” by highly motivated parties whose motives we don’t really know.. Ick. At least Cohen gets the paranoia right.

There are also other stories, (fictional) Cohen’s troubled marriage, his troubled career, his parents story, and a chance encounter in the desert. I all cases, these are loosely real life, highly fictionalized, and full of factual holes. As you can tell, I’m not as impressed as some reviewers with his understanding of IT or computing.

You can call this a large, ambitious effort. And the complexity (and messiness) did keep me reading. There are so many balls in the air, so many questions open, that you want to read on, to slog through the swamps of bad grammar and incomprehensible blather, to find out what happens to these people (if anything).

But we don’t find out. None of the stories are resolved. I don’t mean the stories are left unfinished, there are not one but two characters who are either alive or dead or both, we really don’t know.

It’s horrible.

Maybe that’s the point, that life doesn’t end in a convenient ever after. But still. It pretty hard on the reader to let us into the lives of these troubled people, and not let us know if or how they resolve even the most obvious of the problems.

Why do I find myself suggesting, yet again, that this would be better if it were shorter?  Has ubiquitous word processor technology made it too easy to produce more and more words? Or is it too costly to expend time and effort honing written works?

Would I recommend this book? I’m not sure. I enjoyed parts of it, I hated parts of it.

It is bad history, and totally ignorant of life beyond NYC. It is not an especially intelligent comment on digital technology (except maybe as experienced by writers in NYC in the 90s—who cares?). Cohen may be one of the “important” writers under 40, as some have said, but who cares about that either?

Maybe it is good writing. Or to take a phrase from his book, maybe he is “the writer his generation deserves”.

---

 

1. Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers, New York, Random House, 2015.

 

Sunday Book Reviews