2013 in Books (continued)

I've many things I've mean to post, but being early-jan-going-on-mid-jan, I'd better post my annual summary of the year's reading.

Last year, I decreased my target number of books to read from 48 to 36, and then missed that by one, having read 35.

I read 16 works of fiction and 19 non-fiction books (about the same percentage as last year). Format-wise, 9 were audiobooks, 10 were paper-based, and 16 were e-books (e-books trending up for me, and audio books trending down probably due to lowering my target for the year.

Favorite non-fiction books of the year for me were: The Information, The Signal and The Noise, the Blind Giant, and Born to Run. Favorite works of fiction: Nexus, Wool, Metatropolis. (see links below)

Here's the list grouped by topic, asterisk next to recommended titles, two asterisks next to highly recommended books.

Business
Good Strategy: Bad Strategy
The Coke Machine

The Signal and The Noise**

Overdressed*  (haven't written review yet, but it's good)
Stewardship (haven't written review yet)

Salt Sugar Fat*

Politics/History
Griftopia*

Culture/Art/Media
The American Way of Eating

Sleights of Mind

Future Perfect

Here's Looking at Euclid

Technology
The Information**
Who Owns the Future
The Blind Giant**

Fitness/Health/Self-help
Becoming a Supple Leopard*
First: What It Takes to Win

How will You Measure Your Life

Born to Run**

Biographies/memoirs
Love with a Chance of Drowning

Fiction
Amped
Makers*

Nexus**
The Hangman's Daughter (haven't written review yet)
You
Wool** (haven't written review yet, but it's good)
Robopocalpse
A Crack in Space

Pirate Cinema*

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (didn't bother writing review)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (didn't bother writing review)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Tears in Rain
Metagame*

Metatropolis**

Graphic Novels
The Technopriests BookOne

Book Review: Pirate Cinema

A while back I started Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema but then got distracted by a few other books I had going. I then spotted the audio-book version at the library and finished it that way.

Pirate cinema is a YA novel that is one part Oliver Twist, one part sci-fi, and one part copyright polemic. The lead character, Trent, a UK teen, runs away from home when his family's internet access is cut off after he downloads too many pirated film clips to us in his own amateur film making. After running off to London, he falls in with some other homeless teens, who show him how to make a living and work the system. They then turn their mischievous ways to fighting unjust copyright regulation.

The treatment of the subject matter is a bit blunt but this is probably ok for a YA novel, so I can see past this. The characters are fun, the story is pretty good.

Two flaws that make me give this a 3/5 rating. First, there were a few tangential bits of reference to tech that felt just forced (e.g. reference to Sugru). Secondly, while I was willing to suspend disbelief that the teens in this story could be as street-smart and tech-savvy as they were portrayed, the degree to which they were "foodies" just broke the illusion for me. There were a number of sections that went on at length about elaborate food prep that it's just not likely a teen, let alone a homeless 'freegan' teen, would eat. It read a bit like maybe Doctorow wrote it when dieting himself and was on a diet while writing it.

Those minor complaints aside, it's a fun ride if you don't mind the copyfight pontification.

Book Review: The Crack in Space

I picked up this Philip K Dick book at my local library. It was passable, with some fun bits to it, but the highlight to me was looking at 50-year old futurism  (it was written in '66) and thinking about where the author got it wrong vs not.

The Crack in Space is takes place in a not-too-distant future, where an overpopulated earth has dealt with unemployment and overpopulation by putting people into suspended animation until another planet can be found to go colonize. When a repairman looking at a disfunctional transporter discovers a crack in space that leads to another Earth-like world, the problem may be solved. But of course, it's never as easy as that.

The book, like much 1960's sci-fi, deals with space travel, alternate histories, and other themes that were then de rigeur. There are elements of Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, etc, etc. Even a little free-love thrown in via a giant floating space-brothel.

The story was passable, though perhaps a little predictable. There were some fun characters thrown in there, and a couple unique twists on the above themes.

On the negative side, there were a few things that broke the immersion (over-focusing on racism themes, characters focused on trivialities in the face of massive-scale events, etc).

A highlight for me though, was looking at the then-forward looking view of the future and where it got it wrong. e.g. He foresaw the global nature of satellite TV broadcasts (then a very new thing), but had the character getting up to turn the channel knob on the TV. Or he saw dynamically updated, animated e-newspapers, but they were still distributed the same way and followed the same biz model.

In any case, it was this stuff that gave me pause to think about our own present-day futurism and where we might be getting it wrong.

The Crack in Space

Book Review: Nexus

I really enjoyed Ramez Naam's debut novel, Nexus. As a novel it's a solid debut if a bit formulaic, but as sci-fi/futurism Naam really hits it out of the park.

Nexus is about a bio-tech hacker/researcher who is coerced into working for the government to spy against and ultimate thwart those leading development in his field of research. In this way, it's a very standard average-nerd-in-over-his-head, espionage action-adventure. And even if evaluated only at that level, it's a solid work. If this type of book is your thing, you won't be disappointed.

But what I really loved was the sci-fi trappings of the book. The bio-tech posited in Nexus is a technology to run software on the human brain, to read or change what it's doing, or to run alternate software on it. Three areas are then explored in various ways. The first and least surprising is behavior modification (think of The Matrix's "I know Kung Fu" and you get where this is going). The second is that of the hive-mind, and Naam follows this down several paths of exploration. The third is the concept of a virtual machine. In the ultimate take on "what if you are just a brain in a jar" explored by The Matrix and many others, Naam asks "what if you are just a brain in a jar, and that jar is just a VM running in your REAL brain", he then riffs on this with all the issues around real VMs (rootkits, back-doors, etc). Fun stuff.

Naam uses this sci-fi premise and story to make some points about progress, change, blind obediance to authority, civil liberties and the like. All interesting and most valid, but for me the it was the instruments he constructed to have these discussions that really set the book apart. I can't way to see what he comes up with next.

Nexus

Book Review: Amped

Last week I finished Amped by Daniel H. Wilson. I'd recently read Robopocalypse and enjoyed it so thought I'd give another of his a try.

Like Robopocalypse, Wilson uses well-trod ground to make a statement about our current day erosion of civil liberties in the name of security; and like Robopocalypse, it's well executed.

The book takes place in a near future where neural implants devised to help people (at first those with various disabilities, later anyone with money) focus without distraction. When those with the implants, 'Amps', start exhibiting advantages over regular non-implanted folk, a backlash ensues, and threatens to grow to a civil war.

In the midst of this, the protagonist tries to make sense of it all, while learning that he's one of thirteen unique individuals who were implanted with a little something extra.

Fun read, which can optionally offer some deeper food for thought for those that want it.

Amped

Book Review: Robopocalypse

Robopocalypse was on my to-read list for ages, after being recommended by a friend. Finally got around to reading it and liked it far more than I expected.

As the name implies, this is another book about the rise of the machines. Robots become sentient and attempt to exterminate their makers. Sigh. Well trod ground, right? I, Robot to Terminator, even Frankenstein if you want to extend it to "books playing on people's fear of technology", it's indeed well trod ground.

That said, it's SO well executed. Told from the numerous viewpoints of different characters (including some from the machine side), it's like a series of novellas that come together in the end. The opening ones in particular, when the machines start behaving peculiarly... well I found myself looking sideways at our Roomba, just in case.

Robopocalypse

Book Review: Metatropolis

I really enjoyed Metatropolis, an anthology of five novellas about cities of the future. The authors collaborated some during it's creation, so they share common elements to the background and setting, but are each very unique.

As well as being fun, compelling stories (the last one in particular is a mind-blower), they each present some really intriguing bits of futurism, revolving around sustainable cities, crowd-sourcing, wisdom of the crowds, distributed networks, and so much more. With five authors there's five times the new ideas. With five authors collaborating, it's more like twenty-five times.

Quick read, highly recommended.

Metatropolis

Book Review: Tears in Rain

I added Tears in Rain to my to-read list somewhat impulsively after reading an excerpt published on BoingBoing. It was not without it's flaws, but also had some strong points, and I enjoyed reading most of it despite the flaws.

The book is Blade Runner fan-fic. A noire detective story in a future setting very much in keeping with that film. The main character is a Replicant (Android) drawn into investigating a series of strange Replicant deaths  after one of these occurs in her apartment. The further she unravels the mystery, the more twisted the conspiracy becomes as the bodies keep piling up.

Along the way, there are some very nice bits of sci-fi, both in the smaller details of the settings (courier robots, home automation, etc) and in the larger questions put before the reader (e.g. ethics of tampering with people's memories, when/if that becomes possible, for example. Also I really liked the treatment the author gave to state-control of information and revisionist history when all our history is centralized in a wikipedia-like system. Very thought provoking).

My complaints about the book: (1) It was desperately in need of editing down to about two thirds its size. The author took on too much, and some of it should have stayed on the editing room floor. (2) There was some unimaginative bits of sci-fi that broke the immersion (personal computers are still mobile phones, and they still use GPS). (3) Rather than name-checking the Blade Runner characters or universe, the author name-checks the MOVIE itself, which totally broke the immersion where it was done. Finally (4) while most of the book was too long, the ending definitely felt like it came together and tied off too quickly, like the author was trying to rush.

These flaws aside, it's a good 'B' level read for Blade Runner fans

Tears in Rain

Book Review: Metagame

MetaGame is a scifi thriller that takes place in and around MMO-type games. In this vein, it's similar to Snowcrash, Rainbows End, Ready Player One, and many others.

I found it to be a very engaging story, with some provocative bits technology futurism. I give the book a 3/5 or so rating because it was in dire need of editing. There were parts that were too long and should have been left on the chopping block, and there were parts that could have used cleanup, and some poor choice of language that broke suspension of disbelief at times. Less would have definitely been more.

That said, it's FAR better than Ready Player One that so many found so great last year, so I still recommend it.

Among the interesting bits of futurism: Crowd-sourcing as source for the meta-game and for the hive-mind; Post-scarcity life, and various bits of bio-tech and post-human hackery. The author even does a pretty good job of tackling ethics of genetically engineered human-derivative 'products', despite this being well trod ground.

There's a scene where the lead character, D-lite, has a maddeningly frustrating tech support dispute over the terms of his mind-interface chip's EULA in an attempt to access the source code to his own in-game character, that in itself is worth reading the book. It's thought-provoking gold, and just conceivable enough to be scary.

Well worth reading despite it's flaws.

MetaGame

Book Review: Angelmaker

I loved this book. Angelmaker is steampunk adventure with a noire flavor to it, in which a simple clockmaker, Joe Spork - made very much in the mold of Hitchhiker's Arthur Dent - happens upon an impossibly complicated bit of junk that turns out to be much more than he'd imagined. Its something that many people want and some of those people are not good people, and some of them are very, very bad. He is forced to become more than he imagines he can be to survive it all, let alone figure out what the oddity does.

It would be an imaginative romp at that, but oh, the characters. This is where the book really shines. Ruthless rule-bending policemen, a megalomaniac ruler of an asiatic kingdom, a gruesome serial killer,  a society of undertakers, every color of mobster found in the british underworld, mad scientists, faceless veiled monks, a band of octogenarian grannies turned torturers, and the most libidinous spy ever to come from pen being put to paper... these all come together for a fantastic adventure of the kind that makes you want to grab strangers on the street and tell them they must read this book.

There are some some serious things under all of this that the author is trying to say - about the erosion of civil liberties and granting of unchecked power in the name of anti-terrorism, and about the meaning of truth in dimensions. You can ponder these if you wish, or let them sail by while enjoying the ride.

A bit of trivia: The author, Nick Harkaway, is the son of John Le Carre, and when I learned this, suddenly the book's flashbacks to WWII-era and cold-war spy stuff seemed all the better. In some cases being reminiscent of Le Carre, and in other cases deliberately more fantastical. I've added his other two books to my to-read list.

The book takes a while to get going but it's worth it. The author takes the time to dial up the color and character on all of these pieces, so that he can set them all together into a tightly wound bit of story machine that goes off like clockwork.

Angelmaker

Book Review: Neuromancer

I'd never read William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk thriller, Neuromancer but have had it on the to-read list for a long time. It holds up well, and is amazingly prescient given that it was written in 1984. Not only did he coin 'cyberspace', but think about where your concept of computers and networking in nineteen eighty frikkin four and then imagine, "The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. …Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation". Holy balls.

As visionary as Blade Runner, in some ways more so.

As an aside, I now look upon The Matrix in a whole different light. So much of it was clearly lifted from Neuromancer. I'm surprised there wasn't more talk of it at the time that movie came out.

Anyhow, if you've never read it, do yourself a favor and do so. Get a recent copy as it'll have updates from the author with some perspective on the time since it's writing.

Neuromancer

Book Review: The Windup Girl

I loved The Windup Girl. Biotech steampunk. Monsanto-styled shocktroops. Blade Runner's neon and steel city of the future, but powered by springs and compost. Takes a little while to get going but wow, when it does, it's great. It's sci-fi at it's best in the sense that the author uses a superbly envisioned future to frame social commentary about biotech, genetic modification of food and animals, and corporations holding patents over such things. Some of the characters are a little flat but I'll forgive him that given how well the rest of the book executed.

 The Windup Girl

Book Review: Distrust That Particular Flavor

Usually, I'm not a fan of these types of books, where a publisher has persuaded an author to throw together a bunch of previously published articles, talks, and the like, into a collection for sake of putting it on a shelf.

That said, I found this book pretty good for a couple reasons: (1) It was interesting to learn some background on Gibson's writing process and his, well, I'll call it 'observational research'. (2) There were some interesting bits of background on books of his that I read that gave me new appreciation for them (e.g. I feel much better about Pattern Recognition now), and (3) it was interesting to read these different pieces from over a decade or two, that were each mini-time capsules of futurism, upon which Gibson gives some additional commentary.

If you like speculative fiction and near-term futurism, this is a good read.

Distrust That Particular Flavor

Book Review: The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

Browsing at Powells (aka The REAL Happiest Place On Earth), I happened on Cory Doctorow's The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, a sci-fi novella coupled with a transcript of a lecture on copyright and the arts, and a trascription of an interview with Cory from a couple years back. It was a cheap buy so I picked it up and threw it in my travel bag.

The lecture on copyright is good, but offers little over other talks I've seen him give, so while good, it did little for me. Same goes with the interview. Feels like the publisher added them to pad it up and justify the book price.

That said, the novella was quite clever. It's about a transhuman boy who is sort of an alpha-version of an immortal, who is separated from his inventor/father and forced to make sense of what he is while finding a way to fit in with a very strange and evolving future world. There are a few surprises and twists along the way. Like many of Cory's books, Disney artifacts play a role in the story as well.

It was clever and I quite liked it.

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

Book Review: Rainbows End

It's sometimes said, only half-jokingly, that Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash had such an effect on people that a fair number of them ran off and started VRML-related startups. There is some truth about it's influence. For example, J Allard often cited it as an influence when laying the initial plans for Xbox 360 & Xbox live. Snow Crash's influence had little to do with the book's plot, and far more to do with the compelling vision that Stephenson painted of the Metaverse

What Snowcrash was Virtual Reality, Rainbows End may be to Augmented Reality. I flagged it a while back to read (it was written in 2006!!), but decided to pop it to the top of the stack given renewed excitement around AR.

Vigne paints a truly compelling picture of the tech's possibilities. Some may be father fetched than others, but this doesn't matter. I found it to be intellectually stimulating on the subject of AR and it's possibilities for entertainment, informational and geographic navigation, advertising, education, and tons more.

It's a must read for anyone in tech for that reason alone. If you need more reasons though, how that the book also has...

Octogenarian hackers, mech-powered ARGs, terrorist librarians, crowd-sourcing riots, fan-fic universes, persona-hijacking, "War Against Computing",  materials-hacking shop classes, and at least one waskally wabbit, all involved in giant embroglio that comes to a page-turning crescendo.

Great book, highly recommended for anyone interested in AR's potential, or those that enjoyed Snow Crash or Diamond Age or others of that nature.

Rainbows End

Book Review: Have Spacesuit Will Travel

Have Space Suit, Will Travel is a Robert A Heinlein young adult novel written back in 1958. I spotted it on the shelf in at the library (in audio book form) and picked it up on a whim. I've reviewed a fair number of science fiction books over the past few years, but most of them have been fairly recent. It was interesting to go back to something from the ‘classic’ era of sci-fi, to give perspective.


The story is pretty typical for works written during the cold war and the space race. Boy dreams of going to space, luck aligns such that he does (via alien abduction), and he and a side-kick end up saving the entire human race. Through this lense, we hear the societal worries of that time: Can mankind overcome his savage nature? Will we nuke ourselves out of existence before that can happen? We also hear, as a YA novel, Heinlein trying to plant the seed with the reader to try and generate an interest in the wonders of science.

There are some surprisingly prescient views of the future in this example of Heinlein’s work. There’s an Internet-like knowledge repository, Crowd-sourcing of legal judgments, and a few other gems.

People critique the book for being dated, but I still liked it. I'm going to let my 8-yr old son tackle it on our upcoming vacation (he'll have a lot of airplane time) and see what he thinks.

Have Space Suit, Will Travel

2011 in Books

At the end of last year, I set a goal of getting through 36 books for this year. I exceeded that, completing 44.  They were pretty evenly divided among formats: 15 audio books, 12 e-books, and 17 in printed format. Interestingly though, the breakdown by format was not evenly distributed among topic areas. (e.g. all the fiction I read was in e-book format, where the bulk of the business books were in print). Of those I read in e-book format, most were consumed on the Kindle app on iPad, occasionally syncing and reading on iPhone.


For next year, I'm setting a goal of 48 books. I also want to plan my to-read pile a little better (e.g. some of the audio books I read were random picks at the library as I was under time pressure before a trip), and to be more willing to give up on books that aren't living up to expectations, rather than slogging through them.

As with last year, I'm grouping by topic. One asterisk for recommended books, two for highly recommended. Links are to my reviews, which in turn have links to Amazon or other place to buy.

The summary on recommendations is as follows: My favorite non-fiction book of the year is The Master Switch which I recommend everyone read, and Super Sad True Love Story is my fiction pick of the year. I'll also recommend Escape Velocity if you work at any company of over a hundred employees in which you want to effect change.

Business

• The Master Switch (**)
• Escape Velocity (**)
• Business Model Generation
• Resonate
• How to Lie with Statistics
• Evil Plans
• Poke the Box
• The Whuffie Factor
• Panic
• Liars Poker
• Linchpin
• Do The Work
• Age of Persuasion
• The Undercover Economist

Politics/History

• The Assault on Reason
• 1776 (*)
• The Ascent of Money (*)
• Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
• Outrageous Fortunes
• My Life
• Edward Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism (**)
• Republican Noise Machine
• Havana Nocturne
• Churchill (*)
• The Age of Gold
• Team of Rivals (*)
• Alexander The Great And His Time (*)
• The Next Decade

Culture

• Life
• The Art of Living According to Joe Beef
• The Wave (*)

Technology

• We, Robot (*)
• Best of Technology Writing 2010
• You are not a gadget
• The Filter Bubble (*)

Fiction

• Super Sad True Love Story (**)
• Rule 34
• Ready Player One
• Reamde
• Paintwork (*)
• The Technician (*)
• Anathem (*)
• The Tomorrow Project (*)

Graphic Novels

• SVK (*)

Book Review: Paintwork

Paintwork was a quick fun read. It's a collection of three loosely related novellas stories, all of which are science fiction with an augmented reality premise.

The first story, for which the book is named, follows a near-future graffiti artist who tags corporate AR billboards with his own custom QR codes, overwriting advertising with custom AR artwork. All is fine until someone starts tagging his works within minutes of his doing so, making him wonder if it's an inside job from within the graffiti community.

The second story, called Paparazzi, is a story about gaming culture and celebrity, with a unique take on gold-farming, and some AR stuff thrown in for good measure. It had an interesting twist at the end that made it's premise quite unique, but I found it the weakest of the three stories.

The third story, Havana Augmented, was a real gem. The story centers on some Cuba-based gamer/hacker types who, without legitimate access to technology or game content, hack their own black-market access to leading MMOs. In the process, they innovate in ways the game authors never imagined, open Cuba to investment capital interests, and go on to wage augmented-reality virtual war in the streets of Havana. I loved the vivid picture the author painted and where he ended up taking the story.

This is great near-term sci-fi, with thought provoking near-future pictures of what some of these technologies may bring, combined with action-packed stories with surprising twists.

Paintwork

Book Review: Reamde

I just got done with Neal Stephenson's latest, Reamde: . I think I held my breath for the last 40 pages or so. Whew, what a ride.

Readers expecting something in the way of speculative sci-fi along the lines of Snowcrash or Diamond Age may find it comes up a bit short. The book certainly does a little exploration of "where might MMO's end up, but not to the degree that Stross' Halting State did. That said, it's not like the book won't reward the reader in other ways.

The book takes the reader on a wild ride that starts when some MMO gold farmers try their hand at virus writing to increase revenues, unwittingly tick off some Russian mobsters, who in turn tick off some middle easter terrorists, and then we're off... The rest is classic Stephenson white-knuckle adventure with the reader rooting for the heroes, and not always sure who's on which side.

Reamde: A Novel

Book Review: The Tomorrow Project

Recently, I blogged about science fiction as a tool for forecasting future usages and the like. In that post, I mentioned The Tomorrow Project, a science fiction anthology curated by an Intel co-worker. The project enlisted several science fiction authors to look at what we are researching at Intel and draw from these for their stories.

The book is available for free in PDF form, or can be bought in carbon form here:The Tomorrow Project.

It's a short read and definitely worth getting. I didn't care much for the first story, which is more of a far-reaching sci-fi story. The other three however, are near-future sci-fi vignettes that are each *okay* as stories, but are great imaginative pictures of uses of near-future technology. Among those name-checked and addressed: Home automation, ubiquitous sensors, computer-driven automobiles, media/content creation and more.

I recommend checking it out.


The Tomorrow Project: Bestselling Authors Describe Daily Life in the Future