DARKLAND (TOR, 2006) features Liz Williams’ one-eyed female assassin, Vali Hallsdottir, who works for the all-woman organization, the Skald. The book opens with Vali assassinating a brutal dictator and then being betrayed by her partner. The secret identity of the partner leads Vali on a mission to the super-secret nation of Darkland and later to the weird planet Liz Williams started her SF career with in GHOST SISTER, Mondhile. The novel gets bogged down from time to time as Williams alternates from Vali’s first-person narrative to a third-person narration by the characters on Mondhile. All in all, a satisfying SF adventure.

Liz Williams’ sophomore effort, EMPIRE OF BONES, has all the flaws of a second novel: too many characters, too many subplots, and a breakneck pace. Williams’ develops a future where a highly regimented social structure is maintained by vast intelligences in “The Core” of the galaxy. This social structure resembles the caste setup in India. This is where the novel starts to go wrong. One of the lead characters is Jaya who just happens to be the leader of the anti-caste faction in India. She is also a Receiver who has the power to communicate with the aliens’ depth ship. So part of the novel concerns the revolutionary struggle on Earth and the second part of the novel concerns the galactic conspiracy of the castes to destroy up-and-coming castes like humans. If you can put up with the flaws, there’s still enjoyment in this crammed novel.

Upon first opening this, I thought “Ugh – a book told in letters.” But the letters are witty and quickly grabbed me. This is the story of Juliet Ashton, an author who wrote under the name Izzy Bickerstaff during the war. Tired of writing under her pen name and looking for something deeper than her war writing, she begins correspondence with the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. As the society was started after the German invasion to protect their local citizens, it is a story not only of well loved books but of a community’s survival in the face of adversity. Well crafted, witty, and with a light touch, this is a book I would highly recommend.

Liz Williams says that one of the writers she admires is Jack Vance. There are plenty of Vancean touches in THE POISON MASTER. The planet of Latent Emanation is ruled by the mysterious Lords of Night. Humans live in feudal conditions while the servants of the Lords, the Unpriests, cruelly police the populous. Alivet Dee, an apothecary, flees when one of her clients dies. Alivet meets the Poison Master who takes her off-planet to help him develop a poison that will kill the alien Lords of Night. But there is a conspiracy Alivet needs to untangle before she can decide which side she’s on. At 370 pages, there’s a lot of padding here. A good editor could have shortened the book by a 100 pages or more and made it a better book. But Liz Williams delivers a compelling story with intriguing characters. I’ll be reading more of her work.

I want to be augusten burroughs’ friend. his book makes you fall in love with this quirky, awkward, sophisticated young man. it also makes you kind of awkward, because if you’re reading in a small public space, such as an airplane, it’s awkward to laugh out loud. augusten’s writing makes you feel like you’re apart of his family’s dysfunction. you can feel the tension, smell the mold, hear the screaming, and taste the dog food.
i want to see the movie, but i have a feeling it can’t compete with the pictures i have in my head.

When, in August 1932, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post asked John Maynard Keynes if there had ever been anything like this before, he replied, “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted four hundred years.” LORDS OF FINANCE tells the story of how incredibly stupid financial decisions caused the Great Depression and World War II. Liaquat Ahamed’s brilliant financial history of the economic catastrophes of the early 20th Century holds lessons for our present economic meltdown. This is not only a great piece of financial analysis, this book brings history to life.

I don’t know why Sudhir Venkatesh is still alive. After hanging out with some of Chicago’s most violent gangs as a sociology graduate student for over three years, Gang Leader for a Day tells how gangs work, why most public policy aimed at poverty is useless, and what we might do as a society to make things better for the poor. Venkatesh takes insane risks, but lives to tell the tale of the Dark Side of life in America.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein is a guide to policy makers, teachers, parents, and others who want to “shape” behavior. Thaler and Sunstein start with simple examples like placing healthy food a eye level in a food line and move on to complex 401K decisions. If you’re interested in “nudging” someone in your life to take a particular action, this is the place to start.

James Hawes’ breezy guide to Franz Kafka is filled with literary gossip and dishy speculation. Was Kafka pursuing a married woman at the same time he was engaged? And what was going on during all Kafka’s brothel visits? This book isn’t going to give you any deep insights into Kafka’s works, but if you’re interested in the man behind the myth, Hawes’ book will do nicely.

I enjoyed this short novel. It has physicists and anthrolpologists, blind men, grad students, a psychiatrist, oh and a creature composed of nothingness (entirely made of the absence of anything) that has its own personality and is picky. It is a darkly funny and sarcastic story about love and obsession, while at the same time we are pulled through an academic discussion of what it is to have, and to lack.

Don Norman’s companion book to The Design of Everyday Things (which everyone says is just wonderful, though I personally have not read it) was underwhelming. I thought he was repetitive and reaching for examples. I thought his “future” seems to have happened about three years ago. I thought that his almost total disregard to the internet seems absurd for this decade. And I thought he was at his best when talking about the abstract and not trying to bring in the case studies that again were overused and underinteresting. Not a glowing review, but only because I believe I had such high standards.

Possibly in early January 2007 I was wondering a bookstore (probably Chapters) in downtown Toronto with Arpi, and he pointed out Londonstani, and said a friend was reading it and said it was quite delightful. However even a week later I could only remember that I was recommended to read some book with a pink tiger on the cover.

This pink tiger however, was, of course, only on the british edition and thus it took me quite a few months to figure out what book exactly I was meant to be reading, but I will say — the search was more than worth it.

Gautam Malkani’s debut novel, is honest and british, and has good trying characters that you want to fight for and you want to punch in the face. The dialogue, specifically his ear for slang, is very well captured, and I (obviously) highly recommend this short novel.

“I get a lot of hate mail.” That’s the way Paul Offit starts his story of bad science and risky medicine that exposes the opportunism of lawyers, and the manipulation by journalists, celebrities, and bent politicians. Offit is a specialist in vaccines. However, zealots and special interest groups work the system to push their flawed, tragic agenda. Advocates of junk science and litigation cruelly use autistic children to advance their private agendas. Offit rails against misguided and misinformed parents who are protesting childhood vaccination programs that been successful and saved millions of lives. Doctors and medical researchers who are attacked by greedy lawyers and desperate parents of autistic children deserve our support and admiration.

THE DEVIL’S EYE is a sequel to McDevitt’s popular “Alex Benedict” series. Benedict, and his sexy pilot Chase, sell high-end antiques throughout the galaxy. At the core of all the Benedict series, A TALENT FOR WAR, POLARIS, and SEEKER, there is a mystery. However, in THE DEVIL’S EYE, the mystery is fairly obvious. Even more disconcerting, the mystery is resolved about two-thirds through the book. The last third of the story concerns diplomacy. While THE DEVIL’S EYE is entertaining, it has nowhere near the suspense of POLARIS or SEEKER.

“The striking thing about the seemingly endless collapse of the subprime-mortgage market is how egalitarian it has been. It’s nearly impossible to draw a demographic line between the victims and the perps.” With these words, Michael Lewis introduces us to the world of financial panics. He starts in 1987 with the Wall Street crash, moves to the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, the Internet bubble, and finally, today’s subprime meltdown. In this anthology of articles about these panics, Lewis draws on many excellent writers. I prefer recent Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman’s lucid commentaries. There’s Dave Barry’s hilarious take on real estate. If you want to understand how these financial panics happen, and what to do to fix them, PANIC is the place to start.

It’s easy to write about success, but it’s much harder to write about how to return to being successful after a sickening failure. Rick Pitino was arguably the best college basketball coach in the country when he signed a $50 million contract to become Head Coach of the struggling Boston Celtics. Instead of turning the Celtics around, Pitino’s approach failed. Confronting his failure, Pitino returned to college basketball and built a woeful Louisville team into a contender. Pitino’s book is more than a sports book, it’s a book about how to deal with failure and personal tragedies. Pitino’s infant son dies, his best friend is killed on 9/11. Along with his failure in Boston, this could have crushed Pitino. Instead, Pitino overcomes his demons. This is an excellent book to learn how to deal with life’s travails and achieve success despite Hard Times.

THE NUMERATI are the people who data mine your every click on the Internet, analyze your every purchase at the checkout counter, and monitor your cell phone calls and texting. Stephen Baker describes how YAHOO and GOOGLE slice and dice your data in order to sell your information to advertisers. CMU seems to be heavily involved in this kind of research. There’s also a chapter on the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) to fight terrorism with algorithms. Readers who believe in privacy rights should expect to be disturbed by this book.

If you don’t know a derivative from a sub-prime mortgage, Niall Ferguson’s book will enlighten you. Ferguson delivers a breezy history of money while going off on tangents like how the silver the Spanish took from the Incas actually caused financial problems for Spain and Europe. Money is a mixed blessing. However, Ferguson spends most of his time on explaining the financial intricacies of the past century which contributed to our current fiscal meltdown. Ferguson is a good storyteller which helps when trying to hold readers’ attention during a potential eye-glazing description of how the Federal Reserve system works.

Justin Peacock’s A CURE FOR NIGHT is one of the better first novels I’ve read lately. Joel Deveraux, Columbia Law School grad, is working for a prestigious New York law firm and making scads of money when he gets involved with Beth, a paralegal with a heroin habit. Joel gets hooked on heroin, too, and disaster follows. After his rehab, Joel finds a job as a Public Defender and assists on a murder trial. A good editor could have fixed some of Peacock’s rambling and tightened up the courtroom scenes. But this is just nitpicking. A CURE FOR NIGHT is an impressive debut novel. I’ll be watching for Peacock’s next work. You should too.

David M. Smick’s THE WORLD IS CURVED: HIDDEN DANGERS TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY predicts more troubled times ahead. Smick says China is being run by Tony Soprano and his thugs. It’s hard to look to gangsters for global leadership. And reading Smick on globalization and the world financial system is an eye-opener. Written as a reaction to Tom Friedman’s THE WORLD IS FLAT, THE WORLD IS CURVED is a more nuanced, detailed analysis written by a Wall Street insider. If you want to understand what’s happening (and what’s likely to happen) to the global economy THE WORLD IS CURVED provides a lot of answers.

Before Bear’s Stern there had only been one other big bail-out of the modern era, and that was LTCM. I suppose I may think highly of this book because I finished it the day before the collapse of Bear’s Stern was made public. But either way the book is an excellent read though it may be too technical for some. It is an excellent recount of how some of the most promising “quants” on Wall St, including a couple Nobel Prize winners can go on to create a huge firm that fails even more spectacularly. An excellent read especially considering the current economic situation, highly recommended.

I listened to this on my road trip with Julian. because he made me. sadly, I actually enjoyed it. In the future i will read more of the books. I like Bean. so i will read his story. bean bean bean!

Here’s where the Ender saga got tough to get through. Granted Jane (the first artificially intelligent being) is cool and can do a lot, but the Chinese OCD people are a lot annoying and there is too much family drama for my taste. Still it’s Ender and he kicks ass, but this was much more difficult to get through.

I really enjoyed this book. Another one of my early October reads, back before midterms exploded onto the scene was Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed.
This is a wonderful half-parody of a dystopian society, not only is it incredibly well written, but it is a gripping moving plot with forced homosexuality, the necessity of cannibalism, and a fight between brothers who share a lover.

This makes me want to go read more Burgess, so that will have to get added to the to do list.

This book is sparse and dark and brooding and brilliant. While it may be horribly depressing, the straighforward conversation between a father & son balances the grey scenes of post-destruction. I recommend this quite highly, and on gloomy ash-rainy days if possible so that the feeling of the book overpowers any of the happiness that may be in your soul.