Of Light and Shadow Tanaz Bhathena I don't like writing negative reviews, and I will try to keep this short. On the positive side, the final climactic scene was fairly entertaining. Also, I appreciated  Bhathena 's perspective. In her Author's Note she writes According to the Zoroastrian faith, good and evil, truth and lies, light and shadow are symbolized by twin spirits: Spenta Mainyu (also called Ahura Mazda) and Angra Mainyu (also called Ahriman). While modern Zoroastrians like myself worship Ahura Mazda as the Supreme God, we also believe in the concept of free will and that the twin spirits symbolize the choices we face in our daily lives. I had not, to my knowledge, read a novel told from an explicitly Zoroastrian point of view. I also appreciated that  Bhathena  based her bandit chief Roshan Chaya in part on real Indian bandits: Phoolan Devi and Paan Singh Tomar. But, but, but... If you read a lot of fiction, you may sometimes feel that there are only six stories, w

The Strategy of Conflict Thomas C Schelling There is a HUGE mistake that many of the people who pride themselves on being the most realistic and sophisticated in the world often make. It is exemplified by the first speaker in this quote “Because there really are only two choices. We win and they lose – or else, they win and we lose.” “There’s a third possibility.” “What?” he demanded aggressively. “We all lose.” --  Patriots ,  David Frum It is also possible for everyone to win! It may be true, as they say in  The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress , that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.", but all of economics is built on the principle that there are cheap lunches all around -- lunches whose cost is less than their value. I have lost count of the number of people, both impecunious students and millionaires, who looked on me condescendingly when I suggested that there might be deals that would benefit both students and millionaires. "So naive!" But it is not nai

Crooked Kingdom Leigh Bardugo In  Six of Crows  Kaz Brekker and his team of six Crows broke into Fjerda's most secure prison, the Ice Court, and broke out their most valuable prisoner, Kuwei Yul-Bo. This they were hired to do by Jan Van Eck, at the promised price of 30 million kruge, and they succeeded at great personal cost. But Van Eck stiffed them. He refused payment and attempted to kidnap Kuwei. In this he failed, but he instead kidnapped The Wraith, Inej Ghafa, in the hope of exchanging her for Kuwei. Of course, Kaz and team have no intention of letting this stand. In their view Van Eck has only elevated his debt from 30 million kruge to everything in life that he values. They can accept nothing short of his complete destruction. Come to think of it, every one of the six Crows has a long, long history of ill-treatment at the hands of powerful people who need to get their come-uppance. Kaz puts into motion a plan with two goals. First and most important: revenge! Second, fabul

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon Wole Talabi Most of the characters of  Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon  are gods or godlike. They are diminished gods -- they have corporations and board meetings and quarterly targets, and some of them are wage slaves. Shigidi, when our story begins, is a minor god in the Orisha spirit company. He brings nightmares and death to those whose enemies pray to him, for which service he receives inadequate compensation from the company. On one such assignment he finds himself in conflict with succubus Nneoma, who has a prior claim on the man he is about to kill. Nneoma corrupts or uplifts (depending on ones point of view) Shigidi, and they become partners. Despite not being named in the title, Nnemoa is as much a protagonist of the novel as Shigidi. Shigidi amd Nneoma are hired by Olorun, chairman of the board of the Orisha Spirit Company, to retrieve an artifact that was that was stolen from Africa by the English and is now on exhibit in the Br

Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific By Raft Thor Heyerdahl The biggest obstacle to the adoption of the most radical new scientific ideas is that they just seem crazy. Darwinian evolution, Quantum mechanics, Einsteinian relativity, the Big Bang, Continental drift, the endosymbiotic theory (this is the idea that the organelles in our cells were once bacteria) all faced this obstacle. All of those have been shown beyond any reasonable doubt to be true.  Thor Heyerdahl  had a crazy idea, that the South Pacific islands were settled by voyagers from South America. No one believed this, and it is pretty clear now that he was mostly or entirely wrong. However, the main objection back in the day was that it was not possible to cross 8000 km of ocean in a small open boat of the kind that the people of Peru built. Heyerdahl  proved this objection wrong in the most direct way possible. He built a balsa raft modeled as closely as possible on those the indigenous people of Peru used to build and sailed 800

Onyeka and the Rise of the Rebels Tọlá Okogwu ** spoiler alert **  I am a Star Trek fan. One of the burdens we Star Trek fans bear is the many episodes in which the entire plot is set in motion by one of the supposedly intelligent and competent officers of the Enterprise committing some boneheaded act that produces a crisis that the crew of the Enterprise then spends the entire episode trying to fix. I'm not saying that  Onyeka and the Rise of the Rebels  is like that. I say only that if Onyeka didn't make a lot of puzzling and injudicious choices, the novel would be much shorter. For example (spoiler coming), near the end of the book Dr Dòyìnbó kidnaps Onyeka's best friend Cheyenne from England in order to coerce Onyeka to join him. Onyeka and Ada hare off on their own to rescue Chey. They find where Dòyìnbó has her imprisoned. There are two glass-walled cells. In one of these an ally of theirs is imprisoned. Onyeka tries to break him out, but even her magic hair just boun

Instinct: An Animal Rescuers Anthology Kelley Armstrong, Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, D.J. Butler, E.A. Copen, Lucienne Diver, Hailey Edwards, Alex Erickson, A.J. Hartley, John Hartness, Faith Hunter Instinct: An Animal Rescuers Anthology  is a collection of stories sold to benefit animal rescuers. From the Acknowledgements, "70% of book sale profits are donated to Lifeline Puppy Rescue, a no-kill shelter for puppies in Brighton, Colorado." Naturally most of the stories are about animals. In this context, "animals" should be understood to mean dogs and cats, the occasional dog-or-cat-like Fantasy or Science Fiction creature, and some dinosaurs. Although I didn't read all the stories, I'm pretty sure invertebrates get short shrift, or no shrift at all. BOO! Worms and bugs and mollusks deserve some interest, too! (See, for instance,  Adrian Tchaikovsky 's work.) Confession time: I read only five of the seventeen stories in this anthology. I read the first

Six of Crows Leigh Bardugo A couple weekends ago I watched the four heist films Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen, and Ocean's Eight. That was good preparation for  Six of Crows , even to the trick of including the size of the heist team in the title. Six of Crows  begins with a prolog in which the McGuffin/Secret Formula/One Ring to Rule Them All is introduced. In this case Secret Formula is fairly accurate. It is Jurda Parem, a hopped-up form of the mild stimulant Jurda. Jurda Parem heightens the powers of Grisha, and also is powerfully addictive to them. The inventor of Jurda Parem has been captured by Fjerda and is being held in their most secure fortress, the Ice Court. The Merchants of Ketterdam (think 19th-century Amsterdam) want to break him out (to kill or exploit him -- you decide which to believe). To this end one of them contracts with a leader of the Dregs, a Ketterdam gang, to break him out. The team assembled for the job is Kaz Brekker -- t

First Among Sequels Jasper Fforde We ended  Something Rotten  with what looked a lot like a resolution. We learned that Granny Next, who had been hanging around wearing blue gingham and looking for the ten most boring books ever written, was in fact Thursday herself in her old age. If you've read the previous books in  Jasper Fforde 's  Thursday Next series , nothing will surprise you less to learn that 110-year-old Thursday had somehow become a contemporary of mid-thirty-year-old Thursday and died happily in her presence. And if you HADN'T read the other books, you might think that this means that Thursday is going to survive to a grand old age and die peacefully, in the presence of her family. Happy endings all around! But of course nothing is more labile than the past in the  Thursday Next series . Thursday's husband Landen has blinked in and out of existence for most of the previous books. So, although I do suspect that Thursday's eventual fate will be as foresh

The Bull from the Sea Mary Renault I read  The King Must Die  and  The Bull from the Sea  in High School (about 1971, I'm guessing), then subsequently read everything by  Mary Renault  I could get my hands on. That, I guess, shows what I thought of them. Although her other books are good,  The King Must Die  was the most unputdownable. The two books  are, of course, a retelling of the classic myth of Theseus -- the demigod son of a mortal woman and Poseidon (god of the sea and also the Earthshaker) and Aegeus, king of Athens. (Son of two fathers? Yup, apparently that's something a god can do.) In classical myth Theseus went to Crete, where he killed the Minotaur with the help of the princess Ariadne, whence he returned to Athens (not yet the democracy it was famously to become) to be King. In  Renault 's telling most of the magical events of the myth are rationalized so that, if you want to, you can view them as nonmagical. For instance, instead of having a bull's head,

Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers Jesse Q Sutanto There are six main characters in  Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers , and all of them are broken. Five are people who had relationships with the man who died, Marshall Chen. They are his twin brother Oliver, his wife Julia and two-year-old daughter Emma, Riki, a programmer from Indonesia, and Sana, an artist, who did business with Marshall. Even two-year-old Emma is not entirely all right when the book starts. The sixth main character, of course, is Vera Wong herself. Vera is a stereotypical Chinese mother. She is proud of being a Chinese Mom: "I am mother too. Actually, I am Chinese mother. You can’t get better than that. We raise the best children in the world, you just look at any hospital, all the surgeon are Chinese.” Vera beams with pride, as though she has personally been responsible for all the surgeons in every hospital. Vera runs a tea-shop called "Vera Wang's [sic] World-Famous Teahouse

Romance of the Three Kingdoms Luo Guanzhong, Ronald C. Iverson (Editor), Yu Sumei (Translator) There are four widely-recognized classic Chinese novels. Seriously, do a web search for "classic Chinese novels" and you will find dozens of pages referring to "The Four Classic Novels of Chinese Literature". (Wikipedia lists six on its  Classic Chinese Novels page"  -- these include the usual four, plus two others.) The phrase "Four classic Chinese novels" also appears frequently in commentary on Chinese literature. The four are Romance of the Three Kingdoms The Water Margin Journey to the West Dream of the Red Chamber Some of these come in multiple versions, even in Chinese, and multiple English translations, often with different titles. (For instance,  Dream of the Red Chamber  is also known as  The Story of the Stone .) So it can get a little confusing. In my (inexpert) opinion,  Three Kingdoms  is the best novel of the first three. (I don't include 

Soldier of the Mist Gene Wolfe Roman soldier Latro (not his real name -- it is Latin for "thief") sustains a head injury in 492 BC in one of the many battles of  the Greco-Persian Wars . As a result of this injury, he is unable to remember events more than day in the past. Even his own name is lost, although he still remembers how to write and fight. (This, by the way, is plausible -- factual memories and memories of skills are stored differently in the brain, a neurological detail  Gene Wolfe  obviously knows.) An Egyptian healer gives Latro a lead stylus and a papyrus scroll bearing the words "Read This Each Day". He tells Latro that he must write down the events of every day in the scroll, and read it. This papyrus scroll turns up unexpectedly in a basement of the British Museum and makes its way into the hands of a collector, who, discovering the writing, asks  Wolfe  to translate it.  Soldier of the Mist  is  Wolfe 's translation of the first scroll,  Soldi