Blog Roundup 2018: Books Reviewed

A regular feature of this blog is the Sunday Book Reviews, short reviews of books I read this year.  Most of the books were new or recently published.

This year I reviews 58 fiction and 18 non-fiction books. (This doesn’t count the many articles and reports I comment on throughout the year.)

This years reading included lots of favorites including Thomas Perry, Charles Stross, Joe Ide, Donna Leon, A. Lee Martinez.

There are also some new favorites I discovered this year, including Nnedi Okorafor, Edgar Cantero, Theodora Goss, Vivan Shaw.

Some highly recommended* books:

(*This is a highly unsystematic selection—these are all definitely worth your time, though there may be others in my list below that are even better.)

Non fiction

Stamped From The Beginning  (2016)  by Ibram X. Kendi
The Fighters by C. J. Chivers
Ada’s Algorithm (2014) by James Essinger
Crash Test Girl by Kari Byron

Fiction

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017) by Theodora Goss
Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw
Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw
Circe by Madeline Miller

The Whole List

A list of all the book reviews (in no particular order…)

Fiction

A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman
Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk
Akata Warrior by Nnedi Okorafor
Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
Bonfire by Krysten Ritter
Celestial Mechanics by William Least Heat-Moon
Circe by Madeline Miller
Constance Verity Saves The World by A. Lee Martinez
Dark State by Charles Stross
Dreadful Company by Vivian Shaw
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
French Exit by Patrick DeWitt
Good Guys by Steven Brust
Hope Never Dies by Andrew Shaffer
How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? By N. K Jemisin
I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing by A. D. Jameson
I Only Killed Him Once by Adam Christopher
Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne
Kismet by Luke Tredget
Koko Uncaged by Kieran Shea
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
Make a Nerdy Living by Alex Langley
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
Noir by Christopher Moore
Only To Sleep by Lawrence Osborne
Open Me by Lisa Locascio
Quillifer by Walter Jon Williams
Red Waters Rising by Laura Ann Gilman
Robots Vs Fairies edited by Dominick Parisien Navah Wolfe
Sophia of Silicon Valley by Anna Yen
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw
Street Freaks by Terry Brooks
Tell The Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
The Bomb Maker by Thomas Perry
The Book of Phoenix (2015) by Nnedi Okorafor
The Cackle of Cthulhu edited by Alex Shvartsman
The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp
The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton
The Final Frontier edited by Neil Clarke
The Judge Hunter by Christopher Buckley
The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross
The Man From The Diogenes Club by Kim Newman
The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
The Pope of Palm Beach by Tim Dorsey
The Song of Achilles (2102) by Madeline Miller
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss
The Tangled Lands by Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell
The Temptation of Forgiveness by Donna Leon
There, There by Tommy Orange
This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us by Edgar Cantero
Versailles by Yannick Hill
Who Fears Death (2011) by Nnedi Okorafor
Wrecked by Joe Ide

Non Fiction

Ada’s Algorithm (2014) by James Essinger
Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
City of Demons by Paul French
Crash Test Girl by Kari Byron
Darwin Comes To Town by Menno Schilthuizen
Failure is an Option by H. Jon Benjamin
How To Plan A Crusade by Christopher Tyerman
Nothing edited by Jeremy Webb
Ours To Hack And To Own edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Stamped From The Beginning (2016) by Ibram X. Kendi
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
The Earth is Weeping (2016) by Peter Cozzens
The Fighters by C. J. Chivers
The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
The Tangled Tree by David Quammen
The Wordy Shipmates (2018) by Sarah Vowell
Totally Random by Tanya Bub and Jeffrey Bub
When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney

Sunday Book Reviews

Housekeeping: Q3 Round Up

The third quarter saw continuing interest in freelancing, robots, dinosaurs, bees, and the cryosphere.

On the robot front, there is a burgeoning new topic of “robot social psychology”, (re-)discovering classic social psychological findings.  Amazingly enough, people interact with “humanoid” robots with similar heuristics, assumptions, and biases as they do with “humanoid” humans.

The exciting space news is asteroid missions, with JAXA’s Hyabasu-2 on station and dropping landers and NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission on approach. If all goes well, in the next few years we’ll get not one but two samples returned from these missions.  Cool!

Cryptocurrency and blockchains continue to provide fertile blogfodder.  As the year progresses, the competition for the ultra-coveted CryptoTulip of the Year award heats up.  Who will “win” this year?  Stay tuned for an exciting fourth quarter!

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And, as always weekly book reviews.  (Actually, quite a few more than one book per week this quarter.)

Books Q3 2018

 

Non-Fiction

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
City of Demons by Paul French
Totally Random by Tanya Bub and Jeffrey Bub
The Tangled Tree by David Quammen
Nothing edited by Jeremy Webb
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
Ours To Hack And To Own edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

Fiction

Open Me by Lisa Locascio
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us by Edgar Cantero
I Only Killed Him Once by Adam Christopher
Constance Verity Saves The World by A. Lee Martinez
Only To Sleep by Lawrence Osborne
Tell The Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams
Sophia of Silicon Valley by Anna Yen
Red Waters Rising by Laura Ann Gilman
Kudos by Rachel Cusk
The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
There, There by Tommy Orange

Ideas for Band Names

Bison Calves of Banff
Flugroboter!  (pron.: Floog-robotah)
Density Cusps

 

Book Review: “City of Demons” by Paul French

City of Demons by Paul French

The story takes place in Shanghai in the 1930s, at the end of the era of Shanghai as a extraterritorial port.  Established after the aggressive Opium War, Shanghai was occupied and administered by a consortium of European powers, the United States, and Japan.

This one of the great romantic historical settings, famous from legend and fiction.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, China sank into civil war and anarchy, and Japan invaded and occupied much of the country. By the 1930s, Shanghai was an island in the midst of a chaotic and war torn country, with Japanese troops moving right up to the borders.  Many of the non-Chinese in Shanghai were refugees from Europe or Bolshevik Russia or the law back home.

Within the city and environs, crime and vice thrived.  And in December 1941, Japan took over.  (After the war, Shanghai became part of China—extraterritoriality was over for good.)

French tells the story of two crime bosses, who were briefly successful at the end.  The subtitle is a bit misleading (“The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai”), because the two main characters were important but scarcely the only or even dominant “rulers” of the city.

This book is a sort-of history, but the style is a gawdawful mix in the style of crime fiction.  There is lots of description, some odd poetic passages, and even alleged internal monologs which cannot possible be anything but imagination.  None of this is footnoted or attributed to sources, so it is impossible to know what is fact and what is extrapolation.

This sourcelessness really is a problem because I don’t know what is history and what is romance, and whose point of view is represented by the subjective passages.  This is especially troubling because much of the story is full of rumors and the fog of war. French uncritically and carelessly passes on stuff that ‘everybody knew’, with no way for us to judge.

This is particularly grievous in his shallow generalizations about the Chinese and Japanese (and Russians and so on) in Shanghai at the time.  He clearly is working from American and European sources, and reflects their prejudices.  It’s one thing to portray the hatred and racism of the time, it’s another to simply state them as historical fact with no way for the reader to understand.

The bottom line is that this book seems to reflect bitter and painful recollections of the ousted Shanghai extraterritorials, and a European/American view of the Japanese occupation.  It’s not a very pretty picture, and goes quite a way to demystify the romance of old Shanghai.  But it’s also a very unsatisfactory and incomplete history.

In the end, this is an unpleasant story, and the telling of it is not really to my taste.

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1. Paul French, City of Demons: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai, New York, Picador, 2018.

 

Sunday Book Reviews