Walk in the Glow of Each Other's Majestic Presence

Here are the books I read for the first time in 2017:

The Praxis: Dread Empire's Fall - Walter Jon Williams
The Sundering: Dread Empire's Fall - Walter Jon Williams
Conventions of War: Dread Empire's Fall - Walter Jon Williams
Deadly Engagement: A Georgian Historical Mystery - Lucinda Brant
Revenger - Alastair Reynolds
Metropolitan - Walter Jon Williams
City on Fire - Walter Jon Williams
Deadly Scandal - Kate Parker
Jackaby - William Ritter
The Vanishing Thief - Kate Paker
The Book of Joy - The Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Carlton Adams
Deadly Wedding - Kate Parker
Beastly Bones: A Jackaby Novel - William Ritter
Norse Mythology - Neil Gaiman
Murder on the Serpentine - Anne Perry
Where the Dead Lie - C.S. Harris
A Study in Death - Anna Lee Huber
All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders
Lovecraft Country: A Novel - Matt Ruff
As Death Draws Near - Anna Lee Huber
The Eight - Katherine Neville
The Technologists - Matthew Pearl
The Corporation Wars; Dissidence - Ken MacLeod
Angela's Christmas Adventure - Clara Benson
Enter Pale Death - Barbara Cleverly
Walkaway - Cory Doctorow
Murder in Thrall - Anne Cleeland
Ghostly Echoes: A Jackaby Novel - William Ritter
Half-Ressurrection Blues: A Bone Street Rhumba Novel - Daniel Jose Older
The Chalk Pit (Ruth Galloway Mysteries) - Elly Griffiths
The long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers
Lagoon - Nnedi Okorafor
The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry
Chmistry: A novel - Weike Wang
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. - Neal Stephenson
A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers
A Perilous Undertaking - Deanna Raybourn
Strange Dogs: An Expanse Novella - James S.A. Corey
Murder in Retribution - Anne Cleeland
Raven Black - Ann Cleeves
Tomorrow's Kin - Nancy Kress
In Milady's Chamber - Sheri Cobb South
A Dead Bore - Sheri Cobb South
Family Plot - Sheri Cobb South
Dinner Most Deadly - Sheri Cobb South
Too Hot to Handel - Sheri Cobb South
For Deader or Worse - Sheri Cobb South
Pickpocket's Apprentice - Sheri Cobb South
Children of Earth and Sky - Guy Gavriel Kay
White Nights - Ann Cleeves
Red Bones - Ann Cleeves
Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
Glass Houses - Louise Penny
Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
The Man Who Was Thursday - G.K. Chesterton
Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
An Echo of Murder - Anne Perry
Provenance - Ann Leckie
A Casualty of War - Charles Todd
Party Discipline - Cory Doctorow
This Side of Murder - Anna Lee Huber
Blue Lightning - Ann Cleeves
The Corporation Wars: Insurgence - Ken MacLeod
The Corporation Wars: Emergence - Ken MacLeod
Dead Water - Ann Cleeves
The Power - Naomi Alderman
Thin Air - Ann Cleeves
Cold Earth - Ann Cleeves
Persepolis Rising - James S.A. Corey
The Crow Trap - Ann Cleeves
King of the Dead - R.A. MacAvoy
The Belly of the Wolf - R.A. MacAvoy
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murder and the Birth of the FBI - David Grann

I'm reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, about the progress of world peace to our now remarkably peaceful times. Not that there's not still room for improvement, obviously, but he makes a strong case that in comparison to any earlier time, we live astonishingly peaceful lives. He writes not to engender complacency, but to give heart to those who yearn and strive for peace: It's working! Let's keep going!

There are flaws in the work and it's not always the most lively read, but he does a good job of livening things up. I'm 18% of the way through and there are already many passages I want to remember. I mean to go back and pick some of the earlier ones, but here's the one I'm enjoying at the moment, referring to the change among the attitudes of European leaders beginning around 1700:

As Mueller notes, "No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, 'I came, I saw, I conquered.' Gradually this was changed to 'I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.' This might be seen as progress.

Excerpted from the introduction I wrote for the printed version of my adaptation of Pride & Prejudice:

I’ve always been shy of favorites. People talk about their favorite song, their favorite movie, their favorite book. How on earth do they choose? Is it always their favorite? But I’ve finally had to admit that Pride and Prejudice is probably my favorite book.

I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time when I was twelve years old. On a family vacation, I found a copy on a bookseller’s table at a village market somewhere in Wales, and spent the next few days ignoring my parents from the back seat of our hired car as I was introduced for the first time to Jane Austen’s rich characters and her marvelous wit.

Since then I’ve probably re-read it at least once a year. It has become one of my regular choices when I’m not feeling well, or when I’ve been unhappy or overwhelmed, so in some years I’ve read it two or three times. And when I admit this in public, I am joined by a chorus of fellow-travelers. Pride and Prejudice is on every top ten list of favorite novels of all time.

It can be hard to explain exactly why it’s such a favorite. The story is relatively small and deeply rooted in the particular society of rural England at the turn of the 19th century. It does not deal with grand themes and none of its characters are heroic or unflawed. In fact most of them are quite imperfect, each in their own petty ways, even her protagonists.

Perhaps that is the secret: these characters seem real and by reading about them we can feel that we know them. They are filled with the foibles that make for true individuals. Each is self-absorbed in a particular way—Mrs Bennet’s obsession with the local marriage market, Mr Bennet’s library escape from his own mistakes, Jane’s insistence on the good in everyone, Mary’s longing for accomplishments she lacks the talent to achieve, Darcy’s confidence in his own superiority, Wickham’s clinging to his own likability—the list goes on and on. In the company of these characters we can feel, as Lizzy admits to Jane, that we have not been “so very weak and vain and nonsensical” in comparison, or that if we have, we are at least not alone.

One of the frustrations for the modern reader is the many rules which constrain Austen’s characters and make modern adaptations so very problematic. Why can’t Lizzy just tell all of her suitors to go hang, find herself a nice flat in London, and get a job? Well, because she can’t without exiting the box by which her entire existence is bound. Some readers are rebuffed by these limitations, but I think that for many they are part of the attraction. The game of life in Austen’s work has rules that can seem both quaint and reassuringly solid.

And yet Austen is not chronicling an unchanging society, but one poised at the brink of transformation, in which we cheer the characters on. When Darcy, the example of pride in one’s station, writes to Elizabeth—an unrelated person of the opposite sex—he is committing a major transgression, and in his choice of friends—Bingley is only one generation removed from trade and the Gardiners, with whom we are told he continues to deal famously from a gracious start, are not removed from it at all—he tramples the previously accepted class boundaries, before marrying for a very modern version of love.

Perhaps part of our enjoyment of the story is the quiet revolution it embodies, the idea that major change can stem from such small beginnings.

____________________________

And somehow in all of that I forgot to mention that I'm a sucker for romance and the wit is wonderful. I think those are the reasons it's a fun read, but the above are some of the reasons for its staying power.

Slate today has a review of Steven Pinker's new book on the incredibly more peaceful world we live in and the possibility that we can continue to make strides in that direction. I'm looking forward to reading the book!

I've just spent a couple of hours scrolling through this post on Charles Stross' blog, getting book recommendations from answers to his question of what's the most important novel of the past ten years (given his audience, there's a strong SF bent to the answers). He followed up with this post, narrowing the field to eliminate men.

My to-read list is burgeoning and I'm excited to know about many books I'd never heard of and have others I've glanced at bumped up the queue.

Enjoy!

From New Scientist, here's a short, interesting article by the authors of a new book, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality.

This meme is going around my f-list and I can't resist.

The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

( My list )

The odd thing is that I remember doing this with just ten, but I can't find the entry. Ah, well--it would have been interesting to see how my picks have changed.

[Poll #1633587]

I finally finished Being Wrong yesterday. I found it slow going, not because I wasn't enjoying it--although I do think that the first couple of chapters are the most dense--but because I needed to stop and digest and think about how what Schulz says resonates with my own experiences.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book, was Schulz' examination and concise rendering of questions I've often pondered. She looks at why we're wrong so often, why we have trouble admitting that and go to great lengths to stay on the "right" side of things, and why the connection between "wrong" and "bad" is so hard to sever. She relates personal anecdotes, historical events and medical case histories in an intelligent, yet amusing tone that made it feel like a conversation with a very well-informed friend.

One interesting thing--not having looked before I started, I was surprised to realize after a couple of chapters that the author is a woman. So I also spent a fair amount of time thinking about why I was wrong about that and what the cues were that gave me that impression.

I think I'll be referring back to this one often. Unless I'm wrong.

I'll have an actual review as soon as I finish, but in the meantime, here's another passage that I want to capture:

As I noted at the beginning of this book, we take rightness to be our steady state, while experiencing error as an isolated incident, no matter how many times it has happened to us. This might be a pragmatic choice--just a strategy for getting through the day with a minimum of hassle--but it is also emotionally alluring. Constantly reckoning with the possibility that we are wrong requires remaining aware of the chasm between us and the universe. It compels us to acknowledge that we can't know with certainty the truth about each other or the world, beyond the certainty that, in the deepest and most final sense, we are alone. That explains why we work so hard to dodge reminders of our fallibility, and why we weather so uneasily even our relatively trivial mistakes.