Month 54: Letdown

Month 54 of 260 (20.77 percent)
Size of list: 92,140 pages (18.47 percent above start)
Pages read: 27,870 (30.25 percent)
H-list: 7,770/23,922 (32.48 percent)
N-list: 10,101/37,308 (27.07 percent)
O-list: 9,999/30,910 (32.35 percent)
Reading: The Path of Daggers
Finished: The Triumph of Injustice, Ancillary Mercy

I've been updating this blog late. I'm fairly confident in the numbers, because I keep my spreadsheets updated at least weekly, but I'm a little iffy on the correspondence between what I've finished and those numbers. Nonetheless, what I finished this month was all on the O-list, and the O, we recall, stands for Other: books that neither won a Hugo nor were included on the official D&D inspirational reading list. 

The Triumph of Injustice is not only nonfiction, it's not really a story -- it's a policy book about taxation. The authors, Saez and Zucman, work with Piketty but are based at Berkeley, which is a huge plus. Nonetheless, this book lacked the pizzaz of Piketty translated by Goldhammer. It's a weird thing to say about an economic treatise, but there it is. It's hard to judge how convincing it is, since I'm inclined to agree with them already, at least on the problem.

Ancillary Mercy was a profound disappointment as the third installment of the trilogy that started with Ancillary Justice. The first volume set up this massive galactic showdown between Anaander Miaanai and herself, and the last volume with a very localized resolution. What's going to happen to the Empire? On the Imperial Scale? Who wins? How? This book is good on its own merits, but it doesn't exist on that basis. I wanted resolution of what was set up in volume one, and volume three isn't it, and there's no volume four. Sigh.

Month 53: of dogs and gods

Month 53 of 260 (20.38 percent)

Size of list: 91,770 pages (17.99 percent above start)
Pages read: 27,271 (28.84 percent)
H-list: 7,770/23,922 (32.48 percent)
N-list: 10,101/37,308 (27.07 percent)
O-list: 9,400/30,540 (30.78 percent)
Reading: The Path of Daggers
Added: Blood of Elves, Prose Edda, The Triumph of Injustice
Finished: A Fire Upon the Deep, Second Foundation

A Fire Upon the Deep is the first Vinge I've ever read; it's the first of three, and the first two won the Hugo. It's generally a spacefaring adventure, the story of two kids trapped on a planet alone with aliens, and the humans trying to rescue them while all hell breaks loose in the world around them. The worlds of this novel are filled with interesting ideas, from the aliens the kids are trapped with -- dogs, basically, but whose basic unit of personhood is a pack, not an individual -- to the idea that certain zones are the galaxy simply allow more complex thought than others, and that sometimes those zones shift. And then there are the plant-aliens, the bee-aliens, and the great intelligences that might as well be gods. The book felt too long to me, probably could have been cut down a quarter, but kept me wanting to find out what happens next and interested in how all the elements relate. The main characters are mostly human, but there are some POV chapters for the Tines, as the dog-packs are called, and those are fascinating, as they scheme against each other.

Second Foundation is not as good as the first Foundation, nor as good as the second Foundation. It's good at the beginning and middle but really peters out at the end. Nonetheless it's short enough to be worth reading as I head toward the only Hugo winner in the series, which I hope won on its own merits and not just because the voters wanted to give a win to the series. I'll find out!

Added this month is the first Witcher novel, which is basically because my kid loves it; Prose Edda, because it's the source of so much D&D lore, even if it didn't make the appendices; and The Triumph of Injustice, a current-events policy book that follows on Capital in the 21st Century (even though Piketty wrote his own sequel, thank you).