The Inevitable Round-Up

Looking back on the books I read in 2013, the first thing I notice is there's quite a lot of them.
According to my Goodreads stats, which I think are pretty accurate, I read 42 books this year, clocking in at 12,872 pages. The page count is a bit iffy, since a lot of them were on the Kindle, but still - the main thing I notice is it's a lot more than last year. Before that the count is hard to compare, since I wasn't keeping track of my reading as I went along.

I attribute this increase in volume mainly to more sensible working hours. I owned a Kindle in 2012 (it was my birthday present from my wife), but while it helped me read more on the way to and from work, I was often too cream-crackered to do any reading.
That's still sometimes been the case this year, but in general I've been reading every day.

Looking at the spread of ratings, I am quite pleased. Mostly 3 out of 5s, and bear in mind that 2 is "it was OK" and 3 is "liked it", with 11 4-star ratings, and five 5-stars.
My theory is that if you give too many ratings over three, you just aren't being a very discerning reader. Having said that, the ratings are based on how I felt when I finished them and, like Roger Ebert's film reviews, try to compare the reading experience to books of a similar type. In other words, I don't seriously think The Time Traveller's Wife is better than Swann's Way overall, I just enjoyed it more on the bus to Aberdeen.

So, I don't know, maybe I do think it's better than Swann's Way. (And I nearly gave TTTW 3/5 anyway, except when I'd just finished it, I couldn't bring myself to mark it down for the earlier clunky bits.)

At the other end of the spectrum, my grand unified book-ratng theory holds that if you don't have at least a few ratings below 3, you're staying too much in your comfort zone when selecting your books.

So, half a dozen merely OKs, including the very disappointing The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - I'd rather have read your actual memoirs, Umberto.
And mercifully only one outright bad book this year - Redshirts, by John Scalzi, which reads like the novelisation of a forum discussion thread.

Those 5-star books:
The Death of Mao - James Palmer
A bit of log-rolling for a mate, this rating, but it is properly a good book. I must admit I enjoyed it less than his 1st book, The Bloody White Baron, since the subject matter is less pulp-adventure stuff and more like the sort of thing I used to have to read at university and then for work. Still, good book.

Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O'Connor

Well worth finally getting round to.

The Hittites & Their Contemporaries in Asia Minor - J.G. MacQueen
I nearly gave this less than 5/5 but then wondered, well, what am I marking it down for? Being a bit dry? Not helping me out with pronouncing Turkish place names?  So, full marks as an introduction to the Hittites.

Watership Down - Richard Adams
I was of course familiar with the film, and picked this up expecting something of a light distraction, the sort of thing you might get from The Wind in the Willows or a Wodehouse novel. Instead I got a very moving, gripping epic and lots of useful information about rabbits.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
My book of the year. I had avoided reading this for absolutely ages, put off by descriptions of the book's structure that made it seem dour, daunting and abstruse. Instead it's a page-turner that's grand and silly and sad and everything else.

So there you go.

Pretty narrow to begin with

Tea Leaf Nation runs a piece on the resignation of Chen Hongguo 谌洪果 from Xibei Zhengfa University, quoting his lament on the "narrowing path of academic inquiry".

Getting on for 10 years ago I interviewed a professor of anthropology at Peking University who was keen to stress the limits of expression in his own field. The example he used was that you couldn't talk about any downside to "development" (in the "development studies" sense), because promoting just that was Party policy. You could say what you wanted about things the Party didn't concern itself with, but you didn't get to challenge its decisions.

That a legal professor is feeling the CCP pinch now, rather than years ago, makes sense. Although politics has always been touchy, law and the study thereof has been a boom industry since, oh let's say the 1990s - between 1949 and 1972 only one detective story was officially published in China, because "crime" wasn't a thing, only counter-revolutionary activity, and it wasn't until the 90s that lawyers in China became really numerous. And you can carve out a lifelong career without getting into issues of whether laws are righ or wrong or actually enforced.

Once you start talking about legal reform, though, you're talking about changing things on Party territory. And you still don't get to tell the Party what to do.

Malandros

Much to my surprise, I appear to be working on an RPG with the intention of getting people I don't know playing it.

The high concept pitch: Gangs of New York meets The Wire. In Brazil.

(The high concept pitch needs work.)

People I do know are mostly away for Christmas but in the New Year I hope to arrange some playtesting. The basic structure of the storygame part is OK, since it's based on the DramaSystem SRD - and Hillfolk already exists, so we know that works.

But I need to sit down and try out all my guesstimated difficulty numbers, character generation, and so forth.

Then there's just the small task of explaining in writing what the idea is. 


(Picture from the exuberant Salve A Malandragem! blog.)

A Separate Reality

I've been reading a bit about latter-day Carlos Castaneda, after setting up his cult compound, Tensegrity, all that business.

The events after his death are a Delta Green scenario waiting to happen.

E.g. http://www.salon.com/2007/04/12/castaneda/

This bit -
"He’d become disillusioned with another hero, Timothy Leary, who supposedly mocked Castaneda when they met at a party, earning his lifelong enmity."

- made me think of Johann Hari. another writer of imaginative veracity, who took umbrage when the Dalai Lama made a (pretty tame) gag about him being fat, and heaped scorn on said lama in print whenever a paper-thin pretext present itself.

Carlos Castaneda vs Johann Hari. Maybe our parents were right and the 60s really were better.

Dissident Nostalgia

There's been a fair amount of to-do on HK's streets this past week or so, not as much as in Singapore*, but at least demonstrating political engagement rather than the usual grievances about how capitalism doesn't guarantee you'll get your money back.

If you were shown this photo of the future in 1996, would you believe it possible?

Probably yes, but I think you'd jump to some very different assumptions about just how Fascist China had decided to handle things from 1997 onward.

I don't think the old flag got this much play when it actually was the flag of Hong Kong Across town, a pro-China activist was ripping it up as the standard of traitors.


* The Guardian claimed "this kind of violence is unheard of in Singapore", which is, well... unheard of done to the cops, sure.