Summer Reading

It's been a while since I went through the books I've been reading. Let's see if I can remember what they were about ...

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi
This is the story of a bunch of humans and aliens running around Earth and other planets trying to get their hands on a genetically modified sheep, because it plays an important role in a interplanetary political crisis. As I recall, the book had a little too much going on, particularly at the beginning, and keeping the various characters straight was challenging. The whole premise is a little bit silly, and the book was ok.

American War by Omar El Akkad
Sometime in the second half of the 21st century, there was another American civil war, again between the North and South. The North won once again, but Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia are left as a separate nation. The book is not about the war, but is the life story of a young southern girl who first becomes a refugee, and then becomes essentially a terrorist fighting for the southern cause. The book is dark, grim and unhappy. While the story of her life resolves, it is not a happy ending, and there is no peace and prosperity at the end. War is a terrible, ugly thing.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
I'd heard of Doctorow from xkcd comics, but never read anything by him, and, as it turns out, I'd never even heard of any of his books. But Shannon brought it home from the library. Near-future America (and everywhere else) has turned into a capitalist nightmare, where the uber-wealthy control virtually everything. The backlash to this is the development of "walkaway" culture where people simply walkaway from the rat race and go live semi-nomadic, commune lifestyles. The book follows three young friends who walkaway, but when a group of walkaway researchers make a technological breakthrough the big bad rich people come to take it all away (and kill them, too, because they're the bad guys). Don't read this book if you're going to be triggered by anti-capitalist, pro-socialism-pretty-much-anarchist-communism ideology.

Walking to Listen by Andrew Foreshoefel
Finally, some non-fiction. Andrew was a recent college graduate who decided that he didn't feel ready to enter the real world, so he hatched a plan to go ask other people what life is all about – by walking across the country and asking people. He started at home in the Philadelphia area and made it to the Pacific Ocean, by way of Atlanta, New Orleans, Death Valley and all those places in between. The book is a record of the places he went and the people he met. Crazy people on the sides of forgotten back roads, yes, but also so many people that invited a stranger into their homes so he could shower and get a decent meal. Strangers that emptied their wallets of the 3 bucks they had, so he could get himself a cold drink at the next town. At one point while walking across Texas, he was on a route that a trucker drove back and forth every single day, and after passing him a couple of times, the trucker stopped to ask him what on earth he was doing. After that, the trucker would stop every time he passed him to give him a cold drink or food. The book was good (not great), but at least no one is killing anyone, unlike all the other books on the list today.

Linesman by S. K. Dunstall
This sci-fi novel suffered from not ever getting around to explaining the core technology that shaped their world. I guess even the characters in the book don't really understand it, but usually books get around to revealing something about how it all works at some point. This book felt like it was trying to save all of that for the subsequent books in the series. Basically, interstellar travel is made possible by magical "lines" in a ship that make it all work. This lines can be maintained and repaired by linesman, who have a psychic ability to affect the lines. The story follows one top-rated linesman, who is universally disrespected because of his unusual techniques, but of course, he'll turn out to be more gifted than anyone knows. A strange line-related physical phenomenon, and an alien spaceship start a intergalactic crisis that he ends up in the middle of. I don't plan on reading the next book in the series.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This book is 154 pages of Mr. Coates explaining his life as a black man to his teenage son. It is not neatly organized, or full of fun and humorous stories, but is entirely about his experiences as a black man in america. This book was hard to digest more than a dozen pages at a time, which is made all the more difficult by the book not really having chapters or obvious divisions. When it comes to appreciating what life is like for people who have lived a very different experience than you, I think most people do a far worse job than they think. I hope this book helped a little with that, though the writing style wasn't my favorite. He's a very impassioned writer, but I would prefer a more concise and neutral style.