Rule of Wolves Leigh Bardugo Rule of Wolves  is novel seven in  Leigh Bardugo 's  Grishaverse series , and the last currently extant (as of 31-May-2023). I'm going to assume that you have read the previous six novels. (If you haven't, there will be spoilers.) And you should, because they are good, and they will enhance your enjoyment of  Rule of Wolves . In fact, my first thought on beginning  Rule of Wolves  was "It's so much fun to be back in the  Grishaverse !" I had most recently read several books that, while good, were challenging and required nontrivial effort to read.  Rule of Wolves  was not like that!  Bardugo  dives right in, and it is immediately fun. Of course, she can get away with that because we know the characters and the universe from previous books. This is not cheating -- this is making plans and being smart. So, when we left the  Grishaverse  at the end of  King of Scars  Nikolai Lantsov had ...

Inside, Outside Herman Wouk ** spoiler alert **  I'm not sure when I read  Inside, Outside . Some time around 1984 I read  Herman Wouk 's  Henry Family books  because  War and Remembrance  appeared on a list of the greatest novels of all time. They were certainly very good. (In fact, I remember telling one of my colleagues that  War and Remembrance  was like the American  War and Peace . He dissented vigorously -- in his opinion  War and Remembrance  was far superior.) I subsequently read everything I could find by  Wouk . They are, of course, not all as good as the  Henry Family books , but most of them are nevertheless very good. (I have to confess, though, that I did not succeed in finishing  Youngblood Hawke , and  Marjorie Morningstar  dragged in places.) Inside, Outside  is a Bildungsroman about a Jewish boy/man Israel David Goodkind, who grows up in New York, becomes a naval officer, and eve...

The Hill We Climb Amanda Gorman I read this, of course, thanks to the Florida blockhead who tried to have it banned from school libraries, and succeeded so far as to have it made inaccessible to the youngest students. (I have no patience with this compromise -- at the age of six I was reading books that the Florida school board who took this action surely believed were not appropriate for six-year-olds.) Well, we all know that banned books deserve a look, so I read it. I read the poem first, then went back and read the  Oprah Winfrey  Foreword, because I wanted to experience the poem without  Oprah  telling me in advance what to think of it. In the event, the Foreword is not terrible. It is merely vacuous, but not horribly officious. The poem itself is lovely, although it plods in places. I wish I could say I believed what  Amanda Gorman  has to say, She tells us Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. I wis...

Western Digital My Cloud Ex4100 network-attached storage Western Digital My Cloud Ex2100 network-attached storage In 2015 I bought a Lenovo Thinkserver. I installed a linux OS, and I bought four 4 TB hard disks and installed them. In 2015 4 TB was a big disk. I configured them as two RAID1 arrays, giving me 8 TB of two-fold redundant hard disk storage. I thought at the time that was a lot. I use that system directly, and also as a network fileserver for Windows machines. Recntly the disks started to fill up. To fix that problem I bought a    Western Digital My Cloud 2100 diskless network-attached server   . I put two 8 TB disks I had lying around into it. (Yes, I keep spare hard disks at home -- doesn't everyone?). I configured them as a two-fold redundant array. That gives me an 8 TB network disk. If one of the physical disks breaks, the network disk will continue to function while I replace the broken disk. Note that this is not the same as backup. In my experience the ...

The Will of the Many James Islington Suppose you are a citizen of some nation. As a citizen, you pay taxes. Your government, supported by your taxes, does some horrifying evil thing. (I won't give an example, since we all, almost by definition, disagree about what those things are.) Are you responsible for the evil? Suppose that these immoral things done by your government benefit you, perhaps only in some indirect way over which you have no control. Are you complicit in the evil? Here is what one of the characters of  The Will of the Many  has to say on the subject “Then they were participants and by definition, shared guilt.” “They didn’t have a choice.” ... "Anyone who does not resist them ... is lending them their strength. Is complicit in all that they do." That is the view of just one character -- most others have more nuanced and realistic ideas. But those questions of collective responsibility and complicity are what  The Will of the Many  is about. As philos...

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction Alec Nevala-Lee There: one hundred years ago Science Fiction didn't exist as a literary genre. There were a few books (e.g.  Frankenstein ) that would eventually come to be recognized as science fiction, but in 1923 those dozen or so books were not recognized as a type. Here: we now live in a USA in which almost everyone has heard of Star Wars and Star Trek (whether or not they have seen them) and where science fiction elements are common even in non-mainstream literature. (Example:  The Do-Over , a young adult romance built around a time-loop.) Interest in science fiction is especially high among people who are most concerned with building the future: scientists, engineers, venture capitalists, and creative types. The story of how we got here from there is mostly the story of one man,  John W. Campbell Jr. .  Campbell  edited the pulp (meaning i...

Ender's Game Orson Scott Card ** spoiler alert ** I probably read  Ender’s Game  around 1986, when it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel. Many of the books that win the Hugo are duds, and the same is true of the Nebula, but it has always been my experience that any book that wins both is worth reading.  Ender’s Game  is MORE than worth reading. I enjoyed it tremendously on the first read, and the second. Rather than try to explain why, I am going to recount one incident from early in the book that I believe catches the essence of what makes it great. Most of Ender's (Ender is the nickname of Andrew Wiggin) schoolmates hate him because he is different. Some older boys take him into a bathroom to beat him up. Ender fights back, gets the ringleader down, and savagely beats him, a boy named Stilson. (Stilson eventually dies as a result of the beating.) Ender is subsequently questioned by authorities “Tell me why you kept on kicking him. You had already wo...

Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification Timur Kuran There's a genre of nonfiction I call "New Hammer". It's when the writer has a new idea that he/she thinks explains all kinds of old puzzles, and proceeds to apply that new idea to everything in sight. Some of these are great (e.g.  Plagues and Peoples ), some are not so good ( The Innovator's Dilemma ). This one,  Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification  by  Timur Kuran , is not the best of the bunch, but is nonetheless pretty good. Some of the stories  Kuran  has to tell surprised me, and changed the way I think about certain problems. Kuran 's central idea is deceptively simple -- people lie. What's more, they lie systematically. If you go around Russia asking Russians, "Do you support Vladimir Putin?", the answers will be close to 100% "Yes". It's the only safe answer. But in at least some proporti...

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Mark Twain I think I was a ten-year-old kid when I read  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court  for the first time. Like every other American kid who liked to read, I had read  Tom Sawyer  and  Huckleberry Finn . Honestly, I never loved  Tom Sawyer .  Huckleberry Finn  was better. But then I went looking for more works by  Mark Twain , and found his England novels  The Prince and the Pauper  and  A Connecticut Yankee . I think  A Connecticut Yankee  was probably my favorite  Mark Twain  work. I was familiar by that time with King Arthur, mostly in the form of  T.H. White 's  The Once and Future King .  A Connecticut Yankee  was something different -- it confronted Arthurian legend with modernity. Arthur's court as presented in  A Connecticut Yankee  is a squalid band of ignorant brigands. There is no magic. Characters such as Mer...

Threshold Roger Zelazny, David G. Grubbs (Editor), Christopher S. Kovacs (Editor), Ann Crimmins (Editor) Roger Zelazny  (1937-1995) is one of my favorite, and perhaps my all-time favorite science fiction author. And it's not just me. His work is widely praised, won all the awards, and is still popular.  The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny  is an extraordinary resource for  Zelazny  scholars. I would not dare call myself a  Zelazny  scholar, but I am a scholar of other fields, and recognize what the compilers have done. This is especially valuable because  Zelazny  greatest gift was writing short stories. ( The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny  is slightly misnamed, however, because it includes almost all  Zelazny 's short works -- that includes poetry and essays as well as stories. Editors  Grubbs ,  Kovacs , and  Crimmins  did yeoman's work in collecting even formerly unpublished fragments.)  Zela...

Morgan is my Name Sophie Keetch In the most familiar versions of the legends of King Arthur, which are those of  Thomas Malory  and its many, many derivatives, Morgan le Fay is an evil sorceress enemy of Arthur's. What I learned on reading  Morgan is my Name  is that in the oldest versions of Arthurian legend Morgan was not evil nor an enemy of Arthur's. Indeed,  Sophie Keetch 's Biography reads Sophie Keetch  has a BA in English Literature from Cardiff University, which included the study of Arthurian legend. She is Welsh and lives with her husband and son in South Wales. For her debut novel, she was drawn to Morgan le Fay because of the progression of her character through time, becoming ever more villainous as she was written and rewritten in the words of men.* In broad outline it seems clear what happened. Morgan was a woman and powerful -- she could only be evil in the eyes of men retelling the tale. The Biography continues But beneath the infamy, Soph...

Yellowface RF Kuang Juniper Song Hayward, the first-person protagonist (dare I call her a "hero"?) of  R.F. Kuang 's  Yellowface , is a thief who gets caught. She steals a draft novel from her best friend Athena Liu, who has just choked to death, revises it, and publishes it as her own. It is wildly successful, and June is now wealthy and famous. But then, in a slow-rolling disaster, she gets caught and exposed. (The publisher's blurb lays out the entire plot of  Yellowface , so I can write all that without much worry of spoiling.) It is how June reacts that really makes the story for me. She defies her detractors. She doubles down on defiance. She is not a picture of conventional courage, being fragile and stressed out -- she spends much of the book freaking out -- but to my mind that only underscores her strength of character. Let there be no mistake -- June is evil. She becomes a horrible person who behaves badly out of indefensible and selfish motives. For instanc...

The Diary of Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf This will be a review of the  entire unabridged Diary  -- five volumes. My review title is stolen from some more insightful reader of  Virginia Woolf 's  Diary  -- I don't remember where I saw it, unfortunately, so can't give proper credit. There are several interesting stories told in here. For instance, it is the story of her Bloomsbury group of friends and artists. Aside from  Woolf  herself, most of these were rather dull people, with one major exception: economist  John Maynard Keynes , truly a brilliant man, possessor of what The Indigo Girls call  "a mind without end" . (They are referring to  Woolf  herself with the phrase, but I am repurposing it.) And then there is the story of the Hogarth Press.  Virginia Woolf  and her husband  Leonard  (also an author) purchased a printing press and became a small publishing business, to my mind one of the most inspiring bus...