Category: Book Reviews Page 3 of 5

The response to my last post reviewing the Roman Republic Mystery series SPQR, made me think a post on fiction I’ve loved would be appropriate. After some writing, I decided to limit it to books and series I loved before I left high school to keep the word count down to something reasonable.

I make no particular claim that any of these books have any literary merit, only that that I loved them when I read them. Please add your own fiction loves, especially from when you were young, in the comments. Any comments not on the topic of fiction will be removed as I see them.

Patricia McKillip – The Riddle Master of Hed trilogy

In grades six and seven I loved the first two novels of this trilogy, The Riddle Master of Hed, and Heir of Sea and Fire, like crazy. I read each multiple times. Like no one else I’ve read since, McKillip got the feel of magic and myth right. Her world is lyrical and her magic is magical, not technology in drag.

I’ve read them every decade since, and they hold up. McKillip went on to write a lot of books. In some the prose becomes too dense for me, and I feel these are the best she ever wrote, though it may just be a case of imprinting. Nonetheless, highly recommended.

Marion Zimmer Bradley – The Darkover Series

Bradley became famous outside science fiction with The Mists of Avalon, which is actually where I stopped reading her, and post-death some nasty sexual allegations have come out. All that said, her Darkover series, about a lost colony world being rediscovered by more technologically advanced Terrans made a huge impression on me.

It’s an excellent meditation on colonialism and what happens when a more technologically advanced civilization effects a less advanced one with cultural institutions and traditions that aren’t always inferior. It has psionics and some aliens which shift genders and it’s full of 70s era feminism, and it all winds up feeling both heavy and adventurous, because Bradley could tell an adventure story too when she wanted to.

I read these novels when I was ten to 12 years old, and I haven’t read them since, but they made a huge impression on me at the time.

Harper Hall Trilogy, Anne McCaffery

The first two books in particular imprinted me: DragonSong and DragonSinger, about Menolly, a young girl growing up in a sea-hold where girls weren’t supposed to do music. In the second book Menolly makes it to Harper Hall, where music is allowed, but where the first girl Harper is not looked on favorably by all.

These books are both coming of age novels to the tee, that’s what they do, and they may do it better than any other books I’ve read. Menolly is relatable, and the supporting characters shine.

Great for kids and teenagers, but I think adults can still enjoy them.

Desmond Bagley novels. Bagley was a thriller writer who died in the early 80s. His novels were bestsellers, but he’s forgotten now. Not all of his novels are good. I would avoid Juggernaut, Wyatt’s Hurricane, Bahama Crisis, Windfall, and maybe Flyaway.

Flyaway’s not a good novel, but it is a good paean to the North African desert. The protagonist isn’t very interesting, but the real central character, the desert, is.

Bagley is sexist by today’s standards, but not those of the 1950s through the 1970s.

But Bagley has that magical alchemy that allows first person narrative to work. His characters are people one wants to spend time with. They aren’t interesting or complicated, but they are people who are easy to like.

God Stalk, P C Hodgell

If I had a favorite book as a teenager, this was it, hands down. I probably read it 25 times before I left high school. A partially amnesiac heroine winds up in a city with thousands of Gods where the most powerful institution is the thieves guild. A monotheist herself, the existence of so many gods challenges her faith, and the book chronicles her both becoming a thief, and trying to understand the nature of divinity.

This was a fun, fun, book, but it was also philosophical, character-driven in the best way, and so on. I’ve read it since and enjoyed it, but it does have some coming of age vibe.

Dick Francis Novels

So, Dick Francis only ever really had one protagonist despite their differing names, and in certain senses only ever wrote one novel, just over and over again. They’re all first person, the protagonist is always calm, insightful, capable and inhumanly impossible to push around.

But, if you like that person and that novel, Francis mixes it up enough to make it fun to read over and over again, and Francis was a very good writer. Comfort food books, despite being mysteries often involving death.

White Wing, Gordon Kendall

You’ll probably have trouble finding this one. It’s about a galaxy where Earth was destroyed by alien invaders, and some of the remaining humans fight as mercenaries for a group of worlds opposing those invaders. It’s a book about alienation and about family. It is, in fact, the first book I ever read about polyamory, the White Wing’s squads also being families with more than two adults in them, but I didn’t know what polyamory was, nor care.

Good plot, good characters, good world building (not technologically realistic, but culturally so) and quite heart warming, since it’s really about a family healing its wounds and coming together. Oh, and space fighters with BattleStar Galactica/Star Wars-style battles.

The Girl from the Emeraline Island, Robert S. Blum

Yet another coming of age novel with a female protagonist. This is set in a post-apocalyptic earth, and the Emeraline Isle is dotted with shrine schools which only boys are allowed to go to. The protagonist, of course, has disguised herself as a boy and gone to shrine schools. The book starts as she is discovered.

The rest develops more or less as you would expect, but for some reason this book made a huge mark on me when I read it. It ends well, resolving what needed to be resolved while not destroying the integrity of its world. Sometimes you can win, and the world doesn’t change, or even accept you, and that’s not exactly ok, but it is what it is.

Witch World Series, Andre Norton

Norton was one of the most prolific science fiction and fantasy novelists to ever write and her books show it, they are very uneven, and they aren’t always good.

That said, I read almost everything she wrote, and enjoyed even the bad ones. Her main creation was the “Witch World,” a world with powerful magic, mostly forgotten by mortals, and a multitude of odd races including old ones now long gone.

The Witch World had a feeling common in fantasy at one time (Moorcock had it also) of layering of history that goes back and back and back into myth and legend, with old artifacts and lost gods and cities and secrets and lore that no one could know entirely, with eldritch powers that one could approach but never entirely understand.

Magic was not always reliable or to be trusted; it certainly wasn’t always understood. It was mysterious and sometimes fickle and could be very dangerous to those who approached it without care.

It is this feeling that drew me to the Witch World novels. They don’t feel like modern Americans (or 60s Americans) plunked down in a fantasy world, and the fantasy world doesn’t feel like ours but with magic.

I can’t recommend these novels as highly as some of the others in this post, but I can still recommend them. Start with Witch World or with The Crystal Gryphon and go from there.

Concluding Remarks

I read a ton when I was younger. I know that as of age ten I was reading in excess of ten books a week, because the library lending limit was six, we went once a week, but I also took books out of the school library.

In my teen years, when on holiday, I’d read two or three books a day. In some ways, much of my life can be characterized as reading books with some other stuff happening between books. I always had a book with me, and I was always reading, even in class, to the annoyance of many teachers (but most let it lie since I could answer their questions when called on).

Because they weren’t fiction, I didn’t include the following books above, but in grade 4, I discovered mythology and read every myth I could find, which meant Greco Roman and some Norse. Bullfinch’s mythology, of course, but others. It’s possible that that reading mattered more to me than anything I’ve read before or since.

Because I read so much, I read everything. I remember a series of “nurse novels” from the 60s which I loved, for example, though I don’t remember the names. I read all the SciFi standards like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, as well as many who are long forgotten now like E. E. Doc Smith (better than he reads, because most of the stereotypes he wallows in weren’t stereotypes when he invented them.)

And since my father preferred thrillers I read those too, as a way of getting around that pesky library borrowing limit, which is how I discovered Bagley and Francis, among others.

I read books for escape, no question. To this day I’ve little interest in books that are about wallowing in despair or existential angst and so on; if I want to wallow in that I can read the news or walk down the street. I spent a fair bit of time in places like Bangladesh and Calcutta, I don’t want to spend my free time wallowing in elegantly written middens, I’ve seen the real thing more than I wanted to and I can have an existential moment any time I want to and many I don’t.

One thing I regret about computers it that I read less books, fiction and non fiction. But  lately, that’s changed, as I got an e-reader and it turned out to be book-crack because of how easy and convenient it is.

And that has pleased me. I’ve gone back and re-read a lot of older novels, some I haven’t read in decades, and also read new stuff. And I like that, and as I knew was true, it turns out to be a lot more fun than hanging out on the internet.

Let us know what books you loved when you were young below in the comments.

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There have been a number of technological revolutions during humanity’s existence. Perhaps the most important was the stone age tool revolution, really, but that’s not one we tend to focus on, it being so far in the past. Instead, we focus on the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.

Pandora’s Seed is about the agricultural revolution. As the title suggests, Wells thinks the agricultural revolution was something of a disaster.

This isn’t a novel argument any more, most people have heard it made, and certainly any long time reader of this blog knows I think it is essentially true.

The argument is simple enough: When we look at hunter-gatherers from before the agricultural revolution, they’re healthier and they live longer. After the agricultural revolution, and especially later, after the hydraulic revolution, we are sicker and die sooner. We have a lot more disease. We have gum disease and tooth decay. We are shorter. Women’s hips are narrower, meaning childbirth is harder and the women are less healthy (hip size correlating quite nicely with overall health in women).

Most of these metrics don’t recover for thousands of years. It is not until Hellenic civilization that most of them are exceeded, and when Hellenic civilization collapses, the growth in those metrics ends.

Women’s hip width has STILL not recovered.

And remember that average age statistics include childhood deaths. Take them out, and the average lifespans of many ancient societies look a lot better. It’s a misunderstanding of the general consensus that the natural lifespan was 35 years. The life span was actually about 70, and people who didn’t get to that age didn’t get there due to privation, disease, violence or death in childbirth.

We evolved as hunter-gatherers. It is that simple. We are adapted for that sort of lifestyle. We have made some genetic adaptations to the agricultural lifestyle, without question, but we are not fully adapted to it. The use of cultural change instead of genetic change has led us to be ill-adapted for the way we live.

This becomes, in certain respects, even more extreme post-industrial revolution. It is unquestionable, for example, that we have far more mental illness than our forbears. Humans handle living in industrial society even worse than they do in agricultural societies. We have rampant obesity, because humans are not meant to have easy access to this much sugar and empty carbohydrates all while sitting on their asses all day.

When we do perform labour, whether agricultural labor or industrial, it is generally bad for us. The human body is made for hunting and gathering, not for rote, unnatural repetitive movements, over and over and again.

So in agricultural or industrial societies we eat in ways to which we aren’t adapted, and we work in ways to which we aren’t adapted. And it makes us sick and unhappy.

That is not deny to the obvious benefits of industrialization in particular, simply to note its underside.

As for agriculture, it prevailed because those who took it up (or herding) tended to win wars. Hunter-gatherers were happier, healthier, and lived longer, but they lost wars, and because they didn’t shit nearly as much where they ate, they didn’t have the disease resistance of sedentary agriculturalists. Just going near agricultural settlements would have often been a death sentence.

The core point here is simple: Social and technological advancement are not the same things as increases in human welfare. Mistaking one for another is vastly stupid. Social or technological advancements win if they out-compete other models, and that competition is not based on “is nicer,” it is based, ultimately, on violence. (Most of the world, having been conquered by Europeans after the industrial revolution, is real, real clear on this.)

The agricultural revolution didn’t run humanity off a cliff. But the industrial revolution and our advancements in military technology (aka. nukes) offer us the ability to “win” ourselves to extinction, while making ourselves vastly unhappy doing so.

Perhaps it is time to learn how to take to conscious control of our technology and society, before our unconsciousness causes catastrophes we cannot handle.

This is an important book, to nail into our heads the facts about how advancements work, in a time period long enough ago that we can hopefully look at it with the faintest shred of objectivity.

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So, if you’re going to read only one book about free trade and neoliberalism in relation to developing nations, this is the one to read.

The bottom line is this: The standard advice given by Western economists and experts about how to modernize or industrialize is wrong, actively harmful, and hurts countries.

Countries that do industrialize through mercantile policies (there are maybe four, including Russia), almost without exception, do not engage in free trade; they engage in managed trade behind protective barriers.

This was true of Japan, Korea, and China, among others. (China used iron-like control over currency as its barrier: Trump is wrong now, but not wrong for the key industrialization period.)

Moreover, growth in developing countries was better, generally speaking, under Bretton Woods, which allowed developing countries tariffs and so on. Once neoliberals took over and took it as their mission, in the IMF, World Bank, and elsewhere, to bust tariffs and subsidies and create “free markets,” growth slowed in countries trying to develop using a non-mercantile policy.

In other words, again, if you did what Western experts wanted done, you got hurt bad.

The advice was truly horrendous, based on what should be an essentially niche matter — “comparative advantage.”

Comparative advantage is garbage. Japan’s original comparative advantage was silk production, not cars or advanced electronics. If they had chosen to emphasize their existing comparative advantage, rather than change their comparative advantages, they would be a third world country still.

Those countries which did follow this advice, were usually told that their comparative advantage was in cash crops or commodities. True enough.

Unfortunately, most developing countries have an advantage in cash crops or other commodities. When they all started taking that advice at the same time, it led to increases in supply, which collapsed prices.

To make most cash crops, you have to shove subsistence farmers off their land and set up plantations. The money from exports which was supposed to feed those people didn’t show up, and governments were required to stay the course, going further into debt, rather than being able to pay off their debts with all the money they had been told they would earn.

(Aside: The removal of people from subsistence farming is one reason I doubt the extreme poverty stats, which are based on money. When Mexicans were shoved off their farms due to NAFTA, into slums, they wound up eating less nutritious food for which they had to pay. They had more money, but it’s not clear to me they were better off.)

Chang goes into all of this in far more detail than I can, and the book is well worth reading as a sort of “bullshit inoculation” for common economic nostrums. Most of what we are told causes development simply does not; what does work is known, and as much as possible the world system is set up today to not allow it.

If you want to develop, you either need to be big enough to do mercantalism whether the US likes it or not, be able to bribe US elites (China is both big and bribes US elites) or you need to be a nation the US considers a key ally (like Japan or South Korea), which it is willing to allow to industrialize behind various protections. (Japan’s first industrialization was done as a British ally.)

That’s it, that’s all.

Worth reading.

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The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.