I haven't done one of these in quite a while, long enough that I've already read and reviewed many of these books. John Joseph Adams (ed.) The Far Reaches (sff anthology)
Poul Anderson The Shield of Time (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Phoenix Code (sff)
Catherine Asaro The Veiled Web (sff)
Travis Baldree Bookshops & Bonedust (sff)
Sue Burke Semiosis (sff)
Jacqueline Carey Cassiel's Servant (sff)
Rob Copeland The Fund (nonfiction)
Mar Delaney Wolf Country (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Last Watch (sff)
J.S. Dewes The Exiled Fleet (sff)
Mike Duncan Hero of Two Worlds (nonfiction)
Mike Duncan The Storm Before the Storm (nonfiction)
Kate Elliott King's Dragon (sff)
Zeke Faux Number Go Up (nonfiction)
Nicola Griffith Menewood (sff)
S.L. Huang The Water Outlaws (sff)
Alaya Dawn Johnson The Library of Broken Worlds (sff)
T. Kingfisher Thornhedge (sff)
Naomi Kritzer Liberty's Daughter (sff)
Ann Leckie Translation State (sff)
Michael Lewis Going Infinite (nonfiction)
Jenna Moran Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory (sff collection)
Ari North Love and Gravity (graphic novel)
Ciel Pierlot Bluebird (sff)
Terry Pratchett A Hat Full of Sky (sff)
Terry Pratchett Going Postal (sff)
Terry Pratchett Thud! (sff)
Terry Pratchett Wintersmith (sff)
Terry Pratchett Making Money (sff)
Terry Pratchett Unseen Academicals (sff)
Terry Pratchett I Shall Wear Midnight (sff)
Terry Pratchett Snuff (sff)
Terry Pratchett Raising Steam (sff)
Terry Pratchett The Shepherd's Crown (sff)
Aaron A. Reed 50 Years of Text Games (nonfiction)
Dashka Slater Accountable (nonfiction)
Rory Stewart The Marches (nonfiction)
Emily Tesh Silver in the Wood (sff)
Emily Tesh Drowned Country (sff)
Valerie Vales Chilling Effect (sff)
Martha Wells System Collapse (sff)
Martha Wells Witch King (sff)

As a follow-up to yesterday's post listing my favourite memoirs and biographies I read in 2021, today I'll be outlining my favourite works of non-fiction. Books that just missed the cut include: The Unusual Suspect by Ben Machell for its thrilleresque narrative of a modern-day Robin Hood (and if you get to the end, a completely unexpected twist); Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide to the American Status System as an amusing chaser of sorts to Kate Fox's Watching the English; John Carey's Little History of Poetry for its exhilarating summation of almost four millennia of verse; David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years for numerous historical insights, not least its rejoinder to our dangerously misleading view of ancient barter systems; and, although I didn't treasure everything about it, I won't hesitate to gift Pen Vogler's Scoff to a number of friends over the next year. The weakest book of non-fiction I read this year was undoubtedly Roger Scruton's How to Be a Conservative: I much preferred The Decadent Society for Ross Douthat for my yearly ration of the 'intellectual right'. I also very much enjoyed reading a number of classic texts from academic sociology, but they are difficult to recommend or even summarise. These included One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. 'These are heavy books', remarks John Proctor in Arthur Miller's The Crucible... All round-up posts for 2021: Memoir/biography, Non-fiction (this post) & Fiction (coming soon).

Hidden Valley Road (2020) Robert Kolker A compelling and disturbing account of the Galvin family six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia which details a journey through the study and misunderstanding of the condition. The story of the Galvin family offers a parallel history of the science of schizophrenia itself, from the era of institutionalisation, lobotomies and the 'schizo mother', to the contemporary search for genetic markers for the disease... all amidst fundamental disagreements about the nature of schizophrenia and, indeed, of all illnesses of the mind. Samples of the Galvins' DNA informed decades of research which, curiously, continues to this day, potentially offering paths to treatment, prediction and even eradication of the disease, although on this last point I fancy that I detect a kind of neo-Victorian hubris that we alone will be the ones to find a cure. Either way, a gentle yet ultimately tragic view of a curiously 'American' family, where the inherent lack of narrative satisfaction brings a frustration and sadness of its own.

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape (2021) Cat Flyn In this disarmingly lyrical book, Cat Flyn addresses the twin questions of what happens after humans are gone and how far can our damage to nature be undone. From the forbidden areas of post-war France to the mining regions of Scotland, Islands of Abandonment explores the extraordinary places where humans no longer live in an attempt to give us a glimpse into what happens when mankind's impact on nature is, for one reason or another, forced to stop. Needless to say, if anxieties in this area are not curdling away in your subconscious mind, you are probably in some kind of denial. Through a journey into desolate, eerie and ravaged areas in the world, this artfully-written study offers profound insights into human nature, eschewing the usual dry sawdust of Wikipedia trivia. Indeed, I summed it up to a close friend remarking that, through some kind of hilarious administrative error, the book's publisher accidentally dispatched a poet instead of a scientist to write this book. With glimmers of hope within the (mostly) tragic travelogue, Islands of Abandonment is not only a compelling read, but also a fascinating insight into the relationship between Nature and Man.

The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) Robert O. Paxton Everyone is absolutely sure they know what fascism is... or at least they feel confident choosing from a buffet of features to suit the political mood. To be sure, this is not a new phenomenon: even as 'early' as 1946, George Orwell complained in Politics and the English Language that the word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable . Still, it has proved uncommonly hard to define the core nature of fascism and what differentiates it from related political movements. This is still of great significance in the twenty-first century, for the definition ultimately determines where the powerful label of 'fascist' can be applied today. Part of the enjoyment of reading this book was having my own cosy definition thoroughly dismantled and replaced with a robust system of abstractions and common themes. This is achieved through a study of the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome and Paris. Moreover, unlike Strongmen (see above), fascisms that failed to gain meaningful power are analysed too, including Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Curiously enough, Paxton's own definition of fascism is left to the final chapter, and by the time you reach it, you get an anti-climatic feeling of it being redundant. Indeed, whatever it actually is, fascism is really not quite like any other 'isms' at all, so to try and classify it like one might be a mistake. In his introduction, Paxton warns that many of those infamous images associated with fascism (eg. Hitler in Triumph of the Will, Mussolini speaking from a balcony, etc.) have the ability to induce facile errors about the fascist leader and the apparent compliance of the crowd. (Contemporary accounts often record how sceptical the common man was of the leader's political message, even if they were transfixed by their oratorical bombast.) As it happens, I thus believe I had something of an advantage of reading this via an audiobook, and completely avoided re-absorbing these iconic images. To me, this was an implicit reminder that, however you choose to reduce it to a definition, fascism is undoubtedly the most visual of all political forms, presenting itself to us in vivid and iconic primary images: ranks of disciplined marching youths, coloured-shirted militants beating up members of demonised minorities; the post-war pictures from the concentration camps... Still, regardless of you choose to read it, The Anatomy of Fascism is a powerful book that can teach a great deal about fascism in particular and history in general.

What Good are the Arts? (2005) John Carey What Good are the Arts? takes a delightfully sceptical look at the nature of art, and cuts through the sanctimony and cant that inevitably surrounds them. It begins by revealing the flaws in lofty aesthetic theories and, along the way, debunks the claims that art makes us better people. They may certainly bring joy into your life, but by no means do the fine arts make you automatically virtuous. Carey also rejects the entire enterprise of separating things into things that are art and things that are not, making a thoroughly convincing case that there is no transcendental category containing so-called 'true' works of art. But what is perhaps equally important to what Carey is claiming is the way he does all this. As in, this is an extremely enjoyable book to read, with not only a fine sense of pace and language, but a devilish sense of humour as well. To be clear, What Good are the Arts? it is no crotchety monograph: Leo Tolstoy's *What Is Art? (1897) is hilarious to read in similar ways, but you can't avoid feeling its cantankerous tone holds Tolstoy's argument back. By contrast, Carey makes his argument in a playful sort of manner, in a way that made me slightly sad to read other polemics throughout the year. It's definitely not that modern genre of boomer jeremiad about the young, political correctness or, heaven forbid, 'cancel culture'... which, incidentally, made Carey's 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor something of a disappointing follow-up. Just for fun, Carey later undermines his own argument by arguing at length for the value of one art in particular. Literature, Carey asserts, is the only art capable of reasoning and the only art with the ability to criticise. Perhaps so, and Carey spends a chapter or so contending that fiction has the exclusive power to inspire the mind and move the heart towards practical ends... or at least far better than any work of conceptual art. Whilst reading this book I found myself taking down innumerable quotations and laughing at the jokes far more than I disagreed. And the sustained and intellectual style of polemic makes this a pretty strong candidate for my favourite overall book of the year.

Previously in George Orwell travel posts: Sutton Courtenay, Marrakesh, Hampstead, Paris, Southwold & The River Orwell. Wallington is a small village in Hertfordshire, approximately fifty miles north of London and twenty-five miles from the outskirts of Cambridge. George Orwell lived at No. 2 Kits Lane, better known as 'The Stores', on a mostly-permanent basis from 1936 to 1940, but he would continue to journey up from London on occasional weekends until 1947. His first reference to The Stores can be found in early 1936, where Orwell wrote from Lancashire during research for The Road to Wigan Pier to lament that he would very much like "to do some work again impossible, of course, in the [current] surroundings":

I am arranging to take a cottage at Wallington near Baldock in Herts, rather a pig in a poke because I have never seen it, but I am trusting the friends who have chosen it for me, and it is very cheap, only 7s. 6d. a week [ 20 in 2021].

For those not steeped in English colloquialisms, "a pig in a poke" is an item bought without seeing it in advance. In fact, one general insight that may be drawn from reading Orwell's extant correspondence is just how much he relied on a close network of friends, belying the lazy and hagiographical picture of an independent and solitary figure. (Still, even Orwell cultivated this image at times, such as in a patently autobiographical essay he wrote in 1946. But note the off-hand reference to varicose veins here, for they would shortly re-appear as a symbol of Winston's repressed humanity in Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Nevertheless, the porcine reference in Orwell's idiom is particularly apt, given that he wrote the bulk of Animal Farm at The Stores his 1945 novella, of course, portraying a revolution betrayed by allegorical pigs. Orwell even drew inspiration for his 'fairy story' from Wallington itself, principally by naming the novel's farm 'Manor Farm', just as it is in the village. But the allusion to the purchase of goods is just as appropriate, as Orwell returned The Stores to its former status as the village shop, even going so far as to drill peepholes in a door to keep an Orwellian eye on the jars of sweets. (Unfortunately, we cannot complete a tidy circle of references, as whilst it is certainly Napoleon Animal Farm's substitute for Stalin who is quoted as describing Britain as "a nation of shopkeepers", it was actually the maraisard Bertrand Bar re who first used the phrase). "It isn't what you might call luxurious", he wrote in typical British understatement, but Orwell did warmly emote on his animals. He kept hens in Wallington (perhaps even inspiring the opening line of Animal Farm: "Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.") and a photograph even survives of Orwell feeding his pet goat, Muriel. Orwell's goat was the eponymous inspiration for the white goat in Animal Farm, a decidedly under-analysed character who, to me, serves to represent an intelligentsia that is highly perceptive of the declining political climate but, seemingly content with merely observing it, does not offer any meaningful opposition. Muriel's aesthetic of resistance, particularly in her reporting on the changes made to the Seven Commandments of the farm, thus rehearses the well-meaning (yet functionally ineffective) affinity for 'fact checking' which proliferates today. But I digress. There is a tendency to "read Orwell backwards", so I must point out that Orwell wrote several other works whilst at The Stores as well. This includes his Homage to Catalonia, his aforementioned The Road to Wigan Pier, not to mention countless indispensable reviews and essays as well. Indeed, another result of focusing exclusively on Orwell's last works is that we only encounter his ideas in their highly-refined forms, whilst in reality, it often took many years for concepts to fully mature we first see, for instance, the now-infamous idea of "2 + 2 = 5" in an essay written in 1939. This is important to understand for two reasons. Although the ostentatiously austere Barnhill might have housed the physical labour of its writing, it is refreshing to reflect that the philosophical heavy-lifting of Nineteen Eighty-Four may have been performed in a relatively undistinguished North Hertfordshire village. But perhaps more importantly, it emphasises that Orwell was just a man, and that any of us is fully capable of equally significant insight, with to quote Christopher Hitchens "little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience."

The red commemorative plaque not only limits Orwell's tenure to the time he was permanently in the village, it omits all reference to his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, whom he married in the village church in 1936.

Wallington's Manor Farm, the inspiration for the farm in Animal Farm. The lower sign enjoins the public to inform the police "if you see anyone on the [church] roof acting suspiciously". Non-UK-residents may be surprised to learn about the systematic theft of lead.

At DebConf17, John Sullivan, the executive director of the FSF, gave a talk on the supposed decline of the use of copyleft licenses use free-software projects. In his presentation, Sullivan questioned the notion that permissive licenses, like the BSD or MIT licenses, are gaining ground at the expense of the traditionally dominant copyleft licenses from the FSF. While there does seem to be a rise in the use of permissive licenses, in general, there are several possible explanations for the phenomenon.

When the rumor mill starts Sullivan gave a recent example of the claim of the decline of copyleft in an article on Opensource.com by Jono Bacon from February 2017 that showed a histogram of license usage between 2010 and 2017 (seen below).

From that, Bacon elaborates possible reasons for the apparent decline of the GPL. The graphic used in the article was actually generated by Stephen O'Grady in a January article, The State Of Open Source Licensing, which said:

In Black Duck's sample, the most popular variant of the GPL version 2 is less than half as popular as it was (46% to 19%). Over the same span, the permissive MIT has gone from 8% share to 29%, while its permissive cousin the Apache License 2.0 jumped from 5% to 15%.

Sullivan, however, argued that the methodology used to create both articles was problematic. Neither contains original research: the graphs actually come from the Black Duck Software "KnowledgeBase" data, which was partly created from the old Ohloh web site now known as Open Hub. To show one problem with the data, Sullivan mentioned two free-software projects, GNU Bash and GNU Emacs, that had been showcased on the front page of Ohloh.net in 2012. On the site, Bash was (and still is) listed as GPLv2+, whereas it changed to GPLv3 in 2011. He also claimed that "Emacs was listed as licensed under GPLv3-only, which is a license Emacs has never had in its history", although I wasn't able to verify that information from the Internet archive. Basically, according to Sullivan, "the two projects featured on the front page of a site that was using [the Black Duck] data set were wrong". This, in turn, seriously brings into question the quality of the data:

I reported this problem and we'll continue to do that but when someone is not sharing the data set that they're using for other people to evaluate it and we see glimpses of it which are incorrect, that should give us a lot of hesitation about accepting any conclusion that comes out of it.

Reproducible observations are necessary to the establishment of solid theories in science. Sullivan didn't try to contact Black Duck to get access to the database, because he assumed (rightly, as it turned out) that he would need to "pay for the data under terms that forbid you to share that information with anybody else". So I wrote Black Duck myself to confirm this information. In an email interview, Patrick Carey from Black Duck confirmed its data set is proprietary. He believes, however, that through a "combination of human and automated techniques", Black Duck is "highly confident at the accuracy and completeness of the data in the KnowledgeBase". He did point out, however, that "the way we track the data may not necessarily be optimal for answering the question on license use trend" as "that would entail examination of new open source projects coming into existence each year and the licenses used by them". In other words, even according to Black Duck, its database may not be useful to establish the conclusions drawn by those articles. Carey did agree with those conclusions intuitively, however, saying that "there seems to be a shift toward Apache and MIT licenses in new projects, though I don't have data to back that up". He suggested that "an effective way to answer the trend question would be to analyze the new projects on GitHub over the last 5-10 years." Carey also suggested that "GitHub has become so dominant over the recent years that just looking at projects on GitHub would give you a reasonable sampling from which to draw conclusions".

Indeed, GitHub published a report in 2015 that also seems to confirm MIT's popularity (45%), surpassing copyleft licenses (24%). The data is, however, not without its own limitations. For example, in the above graph going back to the inception of GitHub in 2008, we see a rather abnormal spike in 2013, which seems to correlate with the launch of the choosealicense.com site, described by GitHub as "our first pass at making open source licensing on GitHub easier". In his talk, Sullivan was critical of the initial version of the site which he described as biased toward permissive licenses. Because the GitHub project creation page links to the site, Sullivan explained that the site's bias could have actually influenced GitHub users' license choices. Following a talk from Sullivan at FOSDEM 2016, GitHub addressed the problem later that year by rewording parts of the front page to be more accurate, but that any change in license choice obviously doesn't show in the report produced in 2015 and won't affect choices users have already made. Therefore, there can be reasonable doubts that GitHub's subset of software projects may not actually be that representative of the larger free-software community.

In search of solid evidence So it seems we are missing good, reproducible results to confirm or dispel these claims. Sullivan explained that it is a difficult problem, if only in the way you select which projects to analyze: the impact of a MIT-licensed personal wiki will obviously be vastly different from, say, a GPL-licensed C compiler or kernel. We may want to distinguish between active and inactive projects. Then there is the problem of code duplication, both across publication platforms (a project may be published on GitHub and SourceForge for example) but also across projects (code may be copy-pasted between projects). We should think about how to evaluate the license of a given project: different files in the same code base regularly have different licenses often none at all. This is why having a clear, documented and publicly available data set and methodology is critical. Without this, the assumptions made are not clear and it is unreasonable to draw certain conclusions from the results. It turns out that some researchers did that kind of open research in 2016 in a paper called "The Debsources Dataset: Two Decades of Free and Open Source Software" [PDF] by Matthieu Caneill, Daniel M. Germ n, and Stefano Zacchiroli. The Debsources data set is the complete Debian source code that covers a large history of the Debian project and therefore includes thousands of free-software projects of different origins. According to the paper:

The long history of Debian creates a perfect subject to evaluate how FOSS licenses use has evolved over time, and the popularity of licenses currently in use.

Sullivan argued that the Debsources data set is interesting because of its quality: every package in Debian has been reviewed by multiple humans, including the original packager, but also by the FTP masters to ensure that the distribution can legally redistribute the software. The existence of a package in Debian provides a minimal "proof of use": unmaintained packages get removed from Debian on a regular basis and the mere fact that a piece of software gets packaged in Debian means at least some users found it important enough to work on packaging it. Debian packagers make specific efforts to avoid code duplication between packages in order to ease security maintenance. The data set covers a period longer than Black Duck's or GitHub's, as it goes all the way back to the Hamm 2.0 release in 1998. The data and how to reproduce it are freely available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Sullivan presented the above graph from the research paper that showed the evolution of software license use in the Debian archive. Whereas previous graphs showed statistics in percentages, this one showed actual absolute numbers, where we can't actually distinguish a decline in copyleft licenses. To quote the paper again:

The top license is, once again, GPL-2.0+, followed by: Artistic-1.0/GPL dual-licensing (the licensing choice of Perl and most Perl libraries), GPL-3.0+, and Apache-2.0.

Indeed, looking at the graph, at most do we see a rise of the Apache and MIT licenses and no decline of the GPL per se, although its adoption does seem to slow down in recent years. We should also mention the possibility that Debian's data set has the opposite bias: toward GPL software. The Debian project is culturally quite different from the GitHub community and even the larger free-software ecosystem, naturally, which could explain the disparity in the results. We can only hope a similar analysis can be performed on the much larger Software Heritage data set eventually, which may give more representative results. The paper acknowledges this problem:

Debian is likely representative of enterprise use of FOSS as a base operating system, where stable, long-term and seldomly updated software products are desirable. Conversely Debian is unlikely representative of more dynamic FOSS environments (e.g., modern Web-development with micro libraries) where users, who are usually developers themselves, expect to receive library updates on a daily basis.

The Debsources research also shares methodology limitations with Black Duck: while Debian packages are reviewed before uploading and we can rely on the copyright information provided by Debian maintainers, the research also relies on automated tools (specifically FOSSology) to retrieve license information. Sullivan also warned against "ascribing reason to numbers": people may have different reasons for choosing a particular license. Developers may choose the MIT license because it has fewer words, for compatibility reasons, or simply because "their lawyers told them to". It may not imply an actual deliberate philosophical or ideological choice. Finally, he brought up the theory that the rise of non-copyleft licenses isn't necessarily at the detriment of the GPL. He explained that, even if there is an actual decline, it may not be much of a problem if there is an overall growth of free software to the detriment of proprietary software. He reminded the audience that non-copyleft licenses are still free software, according to the FSF and the Debian Free Software Guidelines, so their rise is still a positive outcome. Even if the GPL is a better tool to accomplish the goal of a free-software world, we can all acknowledge that the conversion of proprietary software to more permissive and certainly simpler licenses is definitely heading in the right direction.

[I would like to thank the DebConf organizers for providing meals for me during the conference.] Note: this article first appeared in the Linux Weekly News.

Work has been hellishly busy lately, so that's pretty much all I've been doing. The major project I'm working on should be basically done in the next couple of weeks, though (fingers crossed), so maybe I'll be able to surface a bit more after that. In the meantime, I'm still acquiring books I don't have time to read, since that's my life. In this case, two great Humble Book Bundles were too good of a bargain to pass up. There are a bunch of books in here that I already own in paperback (and hence showed up in previous haul posts), but I'm running low on shelf room, so some of those paper copies may go to the used bookstore to make more space. Kelley Armstrong Lost Souls (sff)
Clive Barker Tortured Souls (horror)
Jim Butcher Working for Bigfoot (sff collection)
Octavia E. Butler Parable of the Sower (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Parable of the Talents (sff)
Octavia E. Butler Unexpected Stories (sff collection)
Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed (sff)
Jacqueline Carey One Hundred Ablutions (sff)
Richard Chizmar A Long December (sff collection)
Jo Clayton Skeen's Leap (sff)
Kate Elliot Jaran (sff)
Harlan Ellison Can & Can'tankerous (sff collection)
Diana Pharoh Francis Path of Fate (sff)
Mira Grant Final Girls (sff)
Elizabeth Hand Black Light (sff)
Elizabeth Hand Saffron & Brimstone (sff collection)
Elizabeth Hand Wylding Hall (sff)
Kevin Hearne The Purloined Poodle (sff)
Nalo Hopkinson Skin Folk (sff)
Katherine Kurtz Camber of Culdi (sff)
Katherine Kurtz Lammas Night (sff)
Joe R. Lansdale Fender Lizards (mainstream)
Robert McCammon The Border (sff)
Robin McKinley Beauty (sff)
Robin McKinley The Hero and the Crown (sff)
Robin McKinley Sunshine (sff)
Tim Powers Down and Out in Purgatory (sff)
Cherie Priest Jacaranda (sff)
Alastair Reynolds Deep Navigation (sff collection)
Pamela Sargent The Shore of Women (sff)
John Scalzi Miniatures (sff collection)
Lewis Shiner Glimpses (sff)
Angie Thomas The Hate U Give (mainstream)
Catherynne M. Valente The Bread We Eat in Dreams (sff collection)
Connie Willis The Winds of Marble Arch (sff collection)
M.K. Wren Sword of the Lamb (sff)
M.K. Wren Shadow of the Swan (sff)
M.K. Wren House of the Wolf (sff)
Jane Yolen Sister Light, Sister Dark (sff)

My parents were cleaning out a bunch of books they didn't want, so I grabbed some of the ones that looked interesting. A rather wide variety of random stuff. Also, a few more snap purchases on the Kindle even though I've not been actually finishing books recently. (I do have two finished and waiting for me to write reviews, at least.) Who knows when, if ever, I'll read these. Mark Ames Going Postal (nonfiction)
Catherine Asaro The Misted Cliffs (sff)
Ambrose Bierce The Complete Short Stores of Ambrose Bierce (collection)
E. William Brown Perilous Waif (sff)
Joseph Campbell A Hero with a Thousand Faces (nonfiction)
Jacqueline Carey Miranda and Caliban (sff)
Noam Chomsky 9-11 (nonfiction)
Noam Chomsky The Common Good (nonfiction)
Robert X. Cringely Accidental Empires (nonfiction)
Neil Gaiman American Gods (sff)
Neil Gaiman Norse Mythology (sff)
Stephen Gillet World Building (nonfiction)
Donald Harstad Eleven Days (mystery)
Donald Harstad Known Dead (mystery)
Donald Harstad The Big Thaw (mystery)
James Hilton Lost Horizon (mainstream)
Spencer Johnson The Precious Present (nonfiction)
Michael Lerner The Politics of Meaning (nonfiction)
C.S. Lewis The Joyful Christian (nonfiction)
Grigori Medredev The Truth about Chernobyl (nonfiction)
Tom Nadeu Seven Lean Years (nonfiction)
Barak Obama The Audacity of Hope (nonfiction)
Ed Regis Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (nonfiction)
Fred Saberhagen Berserker: Blue Death (sff)
Al Sarrantonio (ed.) Redshift (sff anthology)
John Scalzi Fuzzy Nation (sff)
John Scalzi The End of All Things (sff)
Kristine Smith Rules of Conflict (sff)
Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (nonfiction)
Alan W. Watts The Book (nonfiction)
Peter Whybrow A Mood Apart (nonfiction) I've already read (and reviewed) American Gods, but didn't own a copy of it, and that seemed like a good book to have a copy of. The Carey and Brown were snap purchases, and I picked up a couple more Scalzi books in a recent sale.

Review: Dark Currents, by Jacqueline Carey

Series:	Agent of Hel #1
Publisher:	Roc
Copyright:	2012
Printing:	October 2013
ISBN:	0-451-41483-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	399

This is another much-belated review. Hopefully I can remember the book well enough to do it justice. Daisy Johanssen has normal urban fantasy problems: her father was an incubus who (somewhat unsurprisingly) didn't stick around, she has to keep careful control of her own demonic side, her father occasionally tries to tempt her to invoke demonic power, and it's possible that she could breach the walls protecting the world from demons and bring about Armageddon. The typical sort of thing. Also, there's an unexplained murder in her home town, a mid-western US resort town whose image does not go well with eldritch murders. Daisy's only official role with the town police department is as a part-time file clerk, but this is urban fantasy, so you know the protagonist is going to be hip-deep in some sort of crime investigation. In this case, that's because the Norse goddess Hel (as distinct from the origin of Daisy's father entirely different thing) also lives here, in a manner of speaking, and Daisy is her liaison. In this case, Hel decides she's the one who should dispense justice. Carey previously has primarily been an epic fantasy writer, and this is her first foray into urban fantasy. (Well, arguably Santa Olivia and its sequel count, but those felt closer to superhero fiction to me.) The language and tone of her epic fantasy is far different than the conventions of either urban fantasy or superhero fiction, and I thought Santa Olivia was somewhat awkward in places. (None of the profanity quite worked, for instance.) Dark Currents felt smoother and more comfortable, aided by a charming mid-western feel. A few of Daisy's first-person narrative quirks wore poorly, such as every reference to "the Seven Deadlies," but Carey did a solid job with a typical out-of-her-depth urban fantasy protagonist. I'm pretty tired of the standard mythology of urban fantasy, and that is a bit of a drawback here: vampires and werewolves both feature, and I think I could happily go ten years before reading another story about vampires or hunky werewolves. Carey adds her own take on ghouls, but it's still pretty similar to lots (and lots) of other series. Thankfully, there's a bit of Norse mythology, a bit of fairy, and one extremely memorable lamia (of the serpent-tail-below-the-waist variety, at least some of the time). Lurine, a reclusive, retired starlet, a friend of Daisy's mother, and Daisy's childhood babysitter, is the lamia in question. She absolutely steals the show. The dynamic between her and Daisy is perfect: Carey resists the urge to ruin it with dark hints or falling-outs to increase tension. Instead, she lets it be a bit quirky, a bit complicated, but full of the reliability of a deep friendship. And Lurine is a wonderful character, the kind that only works as a supporting character because she's best seen through other people's eyes. Daisy's mother just makes the dynamic better. The reader can believe she's the sort of person who would have an ill-advised fling with an incubus, but also the sort of person who could raise a daughter like Daisy without many resources other than sheer grit. She never loses her optimistic outlook on the world, but has enough backbone behind it to make Lurine's friendship with her entirely believable. The plot here is nothing particularly special. Daisy unravels various clues, gets deeper into complicated relationships between various factions, occasionally finds herself in serious trouble, and relies on the help of friends and allies. I would have enjoyed the book more with a lot less Cody and more of the less typical mythology. But the relationships between the female characters, and the sheer persistence of mid-western normality and ordinary life challenges in the face of so much supernatural meddling, help this book stand out from the crowd. Dark Currents is different from most of what Carey has written, and you may be a bit disappointed if you were hoping for the epic sweep of the Kushiel series. But I found myself charmed by it, and will be reading the next book of the series. Followed by Autumn Bones. Rating: 7 out of 10

Someday there will be reviews. Also, software releases. But these posts are much easier to write in the evening when my brain is fried. Also, the anticipation of reading good books is delightful. The motivating reason for this order was that Powell's was giving away $10 gift cards with an order, so I bought books to buy more books later. Iain M. Banks Feersum Endjinn (sff)
Jacqueline Carey Autumn Bones (sff)
Robert Caro The Path to Power (non-fiction)
Keith Houston Shady Characters (non-fiction)
Jan Morris Hav (mainstream)
Arika Okrent In the Land of Invented Languages (non-fiction) I've been in a non-fiction mood lately, so lots of random non-fiction here. The Caro is the first volume of his huge biography of LBJ, which is apparently one of the best biographies ever written. The other non-fiction is less serious: one about intentionally-created languages, and the other about the history of punctuation characters. Hav is a travel book about a city that doesn't actually exist, so it fits somewhat with the non-fiction theme.

A few things for which I'd been waiting for quite some time were released, so there was another book order. Allie Brosh Hyperbole and a Half (graphic novel)
Jacqueline Carey Dark Currents (sff)
Debra Dunbar A Demon Bound (sff)
Nicola Griffith Hild (historical)
Ursula K. Le Guin The Unreal and the Real, Volume 1 (sff)
Ursula K. Le Guin The Unreal and the Real, Volume 2 (sff)
Ken Stern With Charity for All (non-fiction) I'm trying to buy fewer books given how many I have and haven't read, and also because I've been on a gaming tear recently and there are only so many hours in the day. Unfortunately, playing a lot of video games means reading fewer books. So I'm trying for quality rather than quantity, and this particular order has one of the best densities of hopefully good books as anything I've ordered in a while. For those who aren't familiar with Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half is one of the most brilliant blogs that I've ever read, and this is a collection plus new stories and new illustrations. I specifically got the hardcover, which is beautiful and very high-quality. I've been waiting for Hild for years since Griffith started talking about writing it on her blog, and now I have the lovely hardcover in my hands. That's probably going to be Christmas reading. The Le Guin is a two-volume hardcover collection of Le Guin's personal favorites from her large lifetime oeuvre of short fiction.

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (338.26 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg Like last month, I did almost nothing concerning dpkg. This will probably change in June now that the book is out The only thing worth noting is that I have helped Carey Underwood who was trying to diagnose why btrfs was performing so badly when unpacking Debian packages (compared to ext4). Apparently this already resulted in some btrfs improvements. But not as much as what could be hoped. The sync_file_range() calls that dpkg are doing only force the writeback of the underlying data and not of the meta-data. So the numerous fsync() that follow still create many journal transactions that would be better handled as one big transaction. As a proof of this, replacing the fsync() with a sync() brings the performance on par with ext4. (Beware this is my own recollection of the discussion, while it should be close to the truth, it s probably not 100% accurate when speaking of the brtfs behaviour) Packaging I uploaded new versions of smarty-gettext and smarty-validate because they were uninstallable after the removal of smarty. The whole history of smarty in Debian/Ubuntu has been a big FAIL since the start. Once upon a time, there was a smarty package and some plugins. Everything was great except that the files were installed in a way that differs from the upstream recommendations. So Ubuntu changed the path in their version of the package and did not check whether it broke anything else (and it did break all the plugins). Despite the brokenness of the plugins, this divergence survived for years. So several packages that were using Smarty were modified to use dpkg-vendor to use the correct path depending on whether it was built on Debian or Ubuntu. In 2010, Smarty 3.0 has been released and instead of upgrading the smarty package to this version, one of the smarty co-maintainers introduced a smarty3 package that used yet another path (despite the fact that smarty 3 had a mode to be compatible with smarty 2).
At some point, I informed him that he had to handle the migration of users of smarty to smarty3 he acknowledged and then lost interest in smarty ( I m no longer using it ) and did nothing. After some more bitrot, smarty has been forcefully orphaned in August 2011 by a member of the security team. And in March this year, it has been removed from unstable despite the fact that it still had reverse dependencies (usually removals only happen when they impact no other packages, I don t know why this wasn t the case here). At least the brokenness attracted some attention to the situation and Mike Gabriel contacted me about it. I offered him to take over the various packages since they all needed a real maintainer and he accepted. I sponsored his uploads of all smarty related packages (bringing in the latest upstream versions at the same time). In the end, the situation is looking better now, except that there s no migration path from users who rely on smarty in Squeeze. They will discover that they need smarty3 in Wheezy and that the various paths have to be adjusted. It s probably acceptable since the new upstream versions are no longer backwards compatible with smarty 2 The Debian Administrator s Handbook At the start of the month, I was busy preparing the release of the book. I introduced the publican-debian package to unstable, it s a Publican brand (aka a set of CSS and XSL stylesheets to tailor the output of Publican) using the Debian colors and using the Debian logo. This brand is used by the book. I also created the debian-handbook package and setup the public Git repository on alioth.debian.org. I was ready or so I thought. A few hours after the announce, the website became unusable because the numerous visitors were exhausting the maximum number of client connections. And I could not increase the limit due to Apache s memory usage (with PHP and WordPress). We quickly off-loaded most of the static files traffic to another machine and we setup bittorrent. The problem was solved for the short term. Thousands of persons downloaded the ebook and to this date, 135 copies of the paperback have been sold. Then I took a one-week vacation. Even though I had no Internet at the place I was, I wandered in the street to find a Freewifi wifi network (customers of the Free ISP can use those freely) to stay on top of incoming email. We quickly received some bug reports and I dealt with the easy ones (typos and the like) on the fly. When I came back at home, I manually placed 54 lulu orders for the people who opted for the paperback as reward during the fundraising campaign. A bit tedious but it had to be done (if only Lulu supported a way to batch many orders at once ). I also wanted a long term solution to avoid the use of an external host to serve static files (should a new traffic spike arrive ). So I installed nginx as a front-end. It serves static files directly, as well as WordPress pages which have been cached by wp-super-cache. Apache is still here listening on a local port and responding to the remaining queries forwarded by nginx. Once I ll migrate to wheezy, I might completely ditch apache in favor of php5-fpm to handle the PHP pages. Last but not least, I wanted to bootstrap the various translations that people offered to contribute. I wrote some documentation for interested translators and blogged about it. It s shaping up nicely check it out if you re interested to help! Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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The Reid Report has an article about the marriage pledge that Michelle Bachmann signed which implies that slavery wasn t so bad [1]. Greg Carey has written an interesting article for the Huffington Post about marriage and the bible [2], I always knew that the so-called conservatives weren t basing their stuff on the Bible, but the truth surprised me. Geoff Lemon has written an interesting blog post about the carbon tax debate in Australia [3]. He focuses on how small it is and how petty the arguments against it are. Lord Bacon wrote an interesting list of the top 100 items to disappear first in a national emergency [4]. Some of them are specific to region and climate but it is still a good source of ideas for things to stockpile. Markus Fischer gave an interesting TED talk about the SmartBird that he and his team built [5]. A flying machine that flaps it s wings isn t that exciting (my local department store sells toys that implement that concept), but having one closely match the way a bird s wings work is interesting.

• [1] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/07/oh-sweet-jesus-bachmann-signed-a-pledge-saying-black-kids-were-better-off-as-slaves/
• [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-carey/bible-weddings_b_887979.html
• [3] http://heathenscripture.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/you-shut-your-goddamn-carbon-taxin-mouth/
• [4] http://baconreport.blogspot.com/2007/07/top-100-items-to-disappear-first-during.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/a_robot_that_flies_like_a_bird.html

Kevin Stone gave an interesting TED talk about the biological future of joint replacement [1]. Using stem cells and animal tissue which has been prepared to destroy the chemicals that trigger immune responses the tissues can regrow. Replacing joints with titanium and ceramic lets people walk again, regrowing them with Kevin s methods allows them to compete at the highest levels of sporting contests! Derek Sivers gave a brief and interesting TED talk advising people to keep their goals secret if they want to achieve them [2]. The Parrot AR.Drone is an interesting device [3], it s a four-propeller helicopter that is controlled by WiFi. Apparently there is little security (it binds to the first WiFi client it sees) which is a significant down-side. It returns a video feed to the controlling iPhone as it flys and can hover when it loses it s connection. It will be interesting to see when people write software for other devices (Android etc). Also I wonder whether there will be open source weapons kits for it. If you could have those devices use either a nerf gun or a lance to attack each other s turbines then you could have drone jousting. Don Marti had an interesting new idea for a crime game [4]. The main concept is to use the element of mistrust that is present in real criminal gangs. The new guy you invite to join a job might inform the police and you won t know for sure. Sometimes a heist will be discovered by the police through bad luck (or good police work) and you will wonder whether there was an informant. The aim is for a simple game design and with the complexity in email discussions between the players. The C64 isn t dead, it s even on the Internet [5], an original C64 is running a web site! Tan Li gave an interesting TED talk about a new headset to read brain-waves [6]. The device in question can be applied in minutes, requires no gel or abrasion of the scalp, connects to the computer wirelessly and is relatively cheap at $300US. The developer s kit (which I think includes a headset) is $500US. I wonder if the community can develop a cheaper version of this which is more open. Lisa Margonelli gave an interesting TED talk about the politics of oil [7]. One of her insightful points is that the subsidies for oil should be shifted from the oil industry to middle-class consumers. But she goes off track a bit by suggesting gradual oil tax increases until 2020, according to the best estimates of groups such as the CSIRO they won t need to have taxes to give a high oil price in 2020! She is aiming for a 20% reduction in petrol use by 2020, but I m not aware of any serious group of scientists who have evidence to suggest that the production capacity in 2020 will be close to 80% what it is now. Slate has a good article about The Innocence Project which uses DNA tests to overturn false convictions [8], it s scarey how badly the justice system works. Rachel Sussman gave an interesting talk about the World s Oldest Living Things [9], nothing less than 2000 years old is included. Nicholas Negroponte gave an interesting EG 2007 talk about the OLPC project [10]. While some of the content about OLPC production is a little dated the OLPC history is relevant and his personal opinions regarding the benefits that children receive from computers are insightful. Jayne Poynter gave an interesting TED talk about life in Biosphere 2 [11]. Her work on mini-biospheres is also interesting. Let s hope we get a permanent Biosphere running outside the Earth sometime soon. Sheryl WuDunn gave an informative TED talk titled Our Century s Greatest Injustice about the plight of women in most of the world [12]. Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote a good article about the use of ssh-agent [13]. You really should use it to secure your ssh keys. Mark Shuttleworth has described the development process for the Ubuntu font [14]. This is a very interesting project and IMHO one of the most significant things that Ubuntu has done. Prior to this an entirely closed development process has been used for font development. Now we are getting a major new font family developed with a free and open process and with some new legal developments for a font license! One thing to note that this project appears to have involved a lot of work from professional font designers, it sounds like Canonical spent a significant amount of money on this project.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_stone_the_bio_future_of_joint_replacement.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself.html
• [3] http://toucharcade.com/2010/09/06/parrot-ar-drone-review-the-coolest-rc-toy-ive-played-with/
• [4] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/software/better-crime-game/
• [5] http://www.c64web.com/
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_margonelli_the_political_chemistry_of_oil.html
• [8] http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/08/17/reasonable-doubt-innocence-project-co-founder-peter-neufeld-on-being-wrong.aspx
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_sussman_the_world_s_oldest_living_things.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/nicholas_negroponte_on_one_laptop_per_child_two_years_on.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_poynter_life_in_biosphere_2.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sheryl_wudunn_our_century_s_greatest_injustice.html
• [13] http://debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/64
• [14] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/537

I guess you can say that A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has been a success. It was published in 1843 and has never been out of print since then. It s spawned all manner of plays, films, adaptations, and spoofs. It s been adapted at least twice by Disney, once featuring Mickey Mouse and another time featuring Jim Carey. We re almost inundated with the story I m not sure how many ways I ve seen it. Yet I had never read the original story by Dickens until just now. And I must say, what a treat it was. Despite knowing the plot in advance, it was a very good read. The 19th century London setting was done well. It wasn t some idealized London as is often portrayed in film adaptations. It had depth, as did the characters. Dickens Scrooge had a troubled childhood, the son of poor and apparently abusive parents. He turned to business, with which he was successful. Along the way, he lost sight of family, and really of his humanity in general, striving to be a richer and more successful businessman at the cost of all else. How apropos this story is for us in the 21st century. Our large banks define success in terms of profits made for their shareholders, while adding more gotchas to the terms of the credit cards held by their customers. Our governments play geopolitical games over weapons, oil, and gas, while unwilling to sacrifice anything to prevent a climate disaster. Our politicians, even in the season of Christmas, turn a blind eye and a cold heart to the suffering of those that can t afford health care for naught but political reasons, rather than trying their hardest to make a plan that will help them reality as soon as possible. And what of us, the citizens of the 21st century? We consume ever flashier cars, houses, computers, and cellphones with data plans, while poverty intensifies across the globe in this economic downturn. Well, count me among those many inspired and reminded by Dickens to be a more empathetic person, to remember how good even many of the poor in the West have it compared to other parts of the world, and to try to do more for others. And that, perhaps, is part of the genius of Dickens. He inspired a complete change of how people looked at Christmas in his time. And his work is no less relevant today; perhaps it hits even closer to home these days. He invites us to carefully consider the question: what does it mean to achieve success in life? And he deftly illustrates that wealth is wrong answer. Here s hoping that many others will also learn a small bit about life from Dickens. How to find it: A Christmas Carol is available for free from Project Gutenberg for reading online, printing, or reading on an ebook reader such as the Kindle. Be careful when buying printed editions. Many have been abridged or improved for a modern audience , and thus lose a lot of the quality of the original. I found at least one edition that looks true to the original; I m sure there are others. [This review also posted to Goodreads]