Derrick Ashby hopes to do better in 2018

Happy New Year all. Off to a good start in 2018 - I finished A Canticle for Leibowitz yesterday - Book 1 of 2018. In the last few weeks I've gotten involved with a group trying to stop the local Council removing all the books from our local library branch and turning it into some sort of High Tech Creative Hub, whatever one of those is. They're trying to attract 18-25 year olds into the library, for some reason. Problem is that the 2016 census tells us that that age group is only 5% of the local population, as against 10% for kids under 10 and 20% for oldsters like me. Needless to say there was no attempt to consult the locals about this plan, so we're up in arms.

Library Management tell us that patronage at the library has dropped substantially in the last 10 years. It's a small place, with shelf room for only about 3,000 books, but they haven't helped by restricting hours of opening to ones that aren't convenient for most people (10 til 2 4 days a week and 2 til 6 on the other 2.) They also don't stock the branch with books that anybody would want to read. Doing my bit - I'm a data kind of guy - I've been consulting the online catalog with a sample of titles, and checking just where in the system they're allocated. I started with a spreadsheet, but I've now set up a Filemaker database. The sample includes titles from an independent bookshop's Summer Reading Guide, Man Booker and Miles Franklin longlist titles, my reading list for the last couple of years, Hugo nominees (well, I'm an sf fan...). Of the nearly 500 titles I've checked, the local library has 55, and only seems to get books when the other 4 branches already have them.

So far we've persuaded Council to rescind their original decision and have a proper period of consultation with locals followed by a public meeting, which is due in mid February. There's a change.org petition (https://www.change.org/p/katherine-copsey-portphillip-vic-gov-au-save-middle-park-library?recruiter=816249481&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition, that so far has 432 signatures. All of this is a lead in to saying that I'm setting up a Filemaker Reading List database this year, which is likely to expand into a full-fledged catalog of the Ashby library, replacing the somewhat badly organised spreadsheet I've been using for the last couple of years. One of the aims is to re-organise and expand the book shelving. At the moment we appear to have 4,301 cm of shelving for books, and it isn't enough.

Welcome back! I'm glad you were able to convince the Council to rethink. I hope it works out in the end.

Happy New Year
Happy New Group here
This place is full of friends
I hope it never ends
It brew of erudition and good cheer.

>1 dajashby: good work! That sounds like a real grassroots movement.

>1 dajashby: sounds like "experts" versus reality. Fight on!

Canticle for Liebowitz, by the way, is one of my all-time favorite books; and years ago, Filemaker was my favorite database, though I thought it had gone extinct long long ago.

Happy reading in 2018, Derrick!

Good luck with the meeting in February.

Happy 2018 reading!

>5 majleavy: I've owned this book for over 40 years, and this is the first time I've read it. It's fairly obviously cobbled together from three stories, but it flows reasonably well. I think I'd give it about 4 stars. Miller was obviously concerned about the dangers of nuclear annihilation when he was writing the book, which wasn't surprising in 1960, and it's pretty obvious from the lunatics in charge of various nuclear armed states at the moment that the problem hasn't gone away. I have difficulty making up my mind whether he had as deep a concern about the Catholic Church, or whether he was in fact deeply committed to its values. His portrayal of most of the religious characters is sympathetic, but he may have been being satiric or ironic.

>2 drneutron: The original decision by Council to accept the report made by Council officers to commit the vile deed was a 6-3 vote, so we only need to change 2 people's minds, and I think we can do that - two of the Councillors that represent our ward voted in favour, and they should be having second thoughts, given the local opposition to it. However, the real problem is persuading the people who actually run the Library that they need to do something to reverse the decline in the branch that doesn't involve closing it. That could be tougher.

>8 dajashby: My memory of the book (I've read it twice, but the last was about a dozen years ago) is that the hierarchy of the Church is held in suspicion, but not the faith itself. Don't know if it signifies anything that I first came across the book in the parish library of the Catholic Church I attended as a youth.

Have just finished reading a charming little book called The fur person, by poet and novelist May Sarton. It's the life story of a cat - the author's cat, in fact, who starts out as a Cat About Town, becomes a Gentleman Cat, and finally emerges as a Fur Person. Book 2 of 2018.

An officer and a spy (Book 3 of 2018), is an account in fiction of the Dreyfus Affair by Robert Harris. I knew of Dreyfus, but not much about him before reading this. It's quite a shocking tale of bureaucratic blundering and persecution seen through the eyes of Georges Picquart, a man who began as a Major on the General Staff of the French Army, a participant in the prosecution of Dreyfus who was convinced of his guilt, and finished being one of the man's champions in the struggle to clear his name. It's salutary to reflect that only 120 years ago it was possible in a modern and cosmopolitan country like France to be a convinced anti-Semite without being required to conceal the fact. Dreyfus was the ultimate scapegoat. He was the only Jew on the French Army's General Staff, and thus fair game to be framed for a minor piece of espionage for which he was punished in a way that was out of all proportion to the offence, even had he been guilty of it, which he wasn't. It would appear that he was also one of those characters it's impossible to really like. Harris is an excellent writer with a remarkably wide range. I really enjoyed his Pompeii, and I really couldn't put this down. 4.75 stars. I borrowed this from the library.

The giant's house (Book 4 of 2018) is a rather peculiar little novel by Elizabeth McCracken. The giant of the title is a boy who suffers from gigantism. The story is told in the first person by Peggy Cort, a small town spinsterish librarian who falls in love with the giant when he is 11, and she is in her late 20's. The book is beautifully written, the characters are completely believable, I can't possibly indulge in any spoilers here, you should read the book. Giving it 4.25 stars.

A gentleman in Moscow (Book 5 of 2018) is the best book I've read for ages. About the life of a Russian aristocrat who in 1922 is exiled by the Bolsheviks to the Metropol Hotel, a luxury hotel off Red Square where he was already living at the time, except that they evict him from his luxury suite and consign him to a small room in the attic. He is forbidden to leave the building on pain of execution, and stays there for the next 30 or so years. He finds meaning in purpose in a life that could have been unbearable. I fell in love with the characters, and the storyline was thoroughly engaging. 5 stars.

Just heard the very sad news that Ursula Le Guin died yesterday. Just started reading The complete Orsinia, which was published recently by The Library of America, who are putting out her complete works. Hainish novels and stories is further down the stack. In 2016 I contributed to a kickstarter project which was aiming to produce a documentary about her. It's currently most of the way through preproduction, I believe. She was a great writer and a wonderful person.

Finished A brief history of everyone who ever lived by Adam Rutherford today (Book 6 of 2018). Began reading this a few months back in 2017. Interesting history of human genetic research. Well written mostly in good plain English. 4.5 stars.

The silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) (Book 7 of 2018) was, I thought, only a fair to middling book. It's the second in a series of crime thrillers. Picked it up at the library, but won't be rushing off to look for the first one. The writing was rather laboured, and the whole thing was a bit too strained. 3 stars.

I murdered my library is a cautionary tale by author Linda Grant, who was moving house after 20 years, and had Too Many Books. It's a very short piece, took me only an hour or so to read, but I'm counting it as Book 8 of 2018, so there. Somewhat amazed that in January I've already dispatched one quarter of the number of books I managed to get through in the whole of last year. What was I doing in 2017?

I've finished 7 books since I was here last:
That used to be us by Thomas L. Friedman & Michael Mandelbaum, in which the authors try and explain what's gone wrong with the USA and how to fix it. The book is interesting because it was published in 2011, and unsurprisingly nobody much has listened. Instead we've got Trump. 3.5 stars, Book 9 of 2018

Some luck, by Jane Smiley was in a list of recommended reading from Ursula Le Guin that came to me as part of a crowdfunding campaign to produce an upcoming doco about Le Guin. It's the first volume of a family saga that follows the members of a midwest farming family from 1920. I enjoyed it, and I can see how it would have appealed to Ursula. 4.5 stars, Book 10 of 2018.

Morgoth's ring is Volume 10 of Christopher Tolkien's "The History of Middle Earth" in which he presents unpublished writings of his father, mostly earlier versions of what has been published. The series is quite patchy. This one covers writings that went into about the first half of what was published as The Silmarilion. I'd give this about 3 stars. Book 11 of 2018.

Malafrena is about half of The complete Orsinia, by the aforementioned Ursula Le Guin. I'm in two minds whether to score it as a book, since it forms part of an omnibus. The Orsinia cycle is a series of stories set in a fictitious Central European country. The action in Malafrena occurs in the 1820s and 1830's in a period of revolutionary activity in Europe. Personal freedom and representative government were two central concerns of the author and both feature in the book. It wasn't a particularly easy read, possibly because Ursula rewrote it a number of times before it was published, but it repays perseverance. 4 stars, Book 12 of 2018.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction September 1962 is the Ted Sturgeon special issue. It includes his When you care, when you love, which was nominated for the Best Short Fiction Hugo in 1963, and I quite liked, and Myrrha, by Gary Jennings which was nominated for the same award and is completely forgettable. I haven't rated all the stories in the issue. It's "Book" 13 of 2018

I've just finished Howard's End, by E.M. Forster, which I was prompted to read after watching the tv mini series. I really enjoyed the show, and I can report that the book is equally good, and that the TV show is a very faithful rendering of it. 4.25 stars and Book 14 of 2018

And finally, I've just finished listening to a reading of The furthest station, a Rivers of London/PC Grant novella written by Ben Aaronovitch and read by the inimitable Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. The next novel in the series is out later this year, but in the mean time you take what you can get, I suppose. This story furthers the plot of the series as a whole by giving a big role to Peter Grant's cousin Abigail, a spunky teenager who he unwisely promised to teach magic if she passed her GCSE Latin. 4.5 stars and "Book" 15 of 2018.

Have just finished a re-read of The broken sword, which is Poul Anderson at his Scandinavian best. 4.5 stars and Book 16 of 2018. I've also been listening to the BBC radio dramatisations of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey crime stories. They can't really be counted as "reads", since they're dramatisations! Good, though. Ian Carmichael as Wimsey and Peter Jones as Bunter (probably best known as The Book in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy).

Endgame, 1945 (Book 17 of 2018) is a fairly hefty (581 p.) non-fiction book about the closing couple of months of World War II in Europe (20th April to 16th July). The events are seen through the eyes of a cast of real people - allied soldiers, war correspondents, SOE operatives, concentration camp inmates among others. I've had the book in my to-read collection for several years, I'm sorry to say, started once but not finished. It's an excellent read. Some things I took away from it are that (1) compared to the Nazis, ISIS/Daesh/Islamic State are a bunch of pussycats, (2) Germany was basically flattened by allied bombing in the last couple of years of the war and was the subject of vast dislocation, and yet was up and running as a democratic state in a handful of years. I wonder how long it will take Syria and Iraq to recover from the impact of civil war, and who will pay and (3) the current wave of refugees/irregular migrants swamping Europe is comparable in size to the refugee crisis that occurred after World War II but not substantially greater. That was solved by a world wide effort that now seems to be sadly lacking. (4.5 stars)

All the birds in the sky, by Charlie Jane Anders (Book 18 of 2018) is a little weird, but in a good way. It was short listed for the 2017 Hugo Best Novel. Haven't quite worked out whether it's YA or not. It struck me when I was most of the way through it that the plot is pretty much the same as Electric dreams and Short circuit, both 1980's films in which a nerdy young man and a gorgeous arty young woman get together with the assistance of Tech. There are a few more complications than that. 4.25 stars. I'm taking fractional points off because I couldn't understand some of the slang.

The fifth season was extremely good. (Book 19 of 2018) Hugo for Best Novel in 2016. Short listed for Nebula in 2015.

The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Book 20 of 2018) was far too long. Some of the writing was really good, and I got quite engaged with the characters, but everything took so long to happen, and I didn't much like the ending. I'm prepared to award it 3 stars.

Every heart a doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Book 21 of 2018) was on my list because it won for the Hugo for Best Novella in 2017. I read it in about a day, because I'd borrowed it from the library and it had sat there for several weeks while I read The time traveler's wife and was overdue. I didn't think much of it, to be honest. It was reminiscent of Harry Potter in patches and Jasper Fforde in other patches. Teenage children find doorways to other worlds where whatever teenage angst they are suffering from can be accommodated. When they return to the real world they have a lot of trouble fitting back in and are sent off to boarding schools run by adults who have survived similar experiences. I don't think the idea was particularly well explained or developed, and the characters were somewhat unconvincing. It's always possible that I would have liked it better if I was 50 years younger when I read it, I don't know. I'm giving it 2 stars.

Read The growth delusion by David Pilling as an ebook, mostly on my iPhone. Quite a good dissertation on what's wrong with the GDP as measure of success. Didn't really tell me anything I didn't know, however. Book 22 of 2018. I'd award it 3.5 stars.

Dead right, is a Quarterly Essay by Richard Denniss on the failure of neoliberalism. Book 23 of 2018. Denniss is extremely lucid in his take down of what's been the prevailing orthodoxy in Western economics and politics for the last 50-60 years. 4 stars

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. A re-read (I realise that I read it first in 1969, so almost 50 years ago). Asimov is the quintessential Golden Age sf writer, and the Foundation Trilogy is the, er, foundation of the future history concept. There are some weird aspects. The book has no female character until the very last part, and she is a shrew of a woman. Everything is powered by atomic energy. It's still great stuff. Book 24 of 2018. 4.5 stars.

Northwest of Earth, by C.L. Moore. Book 25 of 2018. Took my a while to get through this, which isn't to say that it didn't contain a number of good stories. The problem was that a lot of them had a degree of sameness about them. C.L. Moore was one of the first successful women writers of sf, and was already so when she met Henry Kuttner, whom she later married. All the stories date from the 1930's and were first published in the pulps. Werewoman was awarded a retrospective Hugo. It was a reasonably good retelling of the Circe story. 3.75 stars

The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin. Book 26 of 2018. Every bit as good as The fifth season. Won Hugo Award for best novel 2017. I borrowed the first two volumes from the library, and I've now pre-ordered a boxed set of the three books in the trilogy. Should arrive some time in October. 5 stars.

Just finished re-reading A wizard of Earthsea. Book 27 of 2018. My original Puffin edition from 1971 is falling apart. Wonderful book. 5 stars

The football solution (Book 28 of 2018) is by one of my favourite political and economic journalists. It's about his AFL football club, Richmond, that won its first premiership for 37 years last year. George thinks that our current crop of politicians could learn some things from how it went about the task. I suspect that he's right. 4 stars

Slightly embarrassed to report that I've reembarked on Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, which will be the second re-read in the last few years. My excuse is that there is a new book coming out in November. Have finished The Rivers of London, Book 29 of 2018.

Finished The language of the night, by Ursula Le Guin. Thought provoking collection of writing about science fiction and fantasy by my favourite writer, edited by Susan Wood. Published in 1978. I picked up a mint hardcover edition from the second hand book stall at the market. Highly recommended. 5 stars from me. Book 30 of 2018

Finished Moon over Soho, Peter Grant #2. Book 31 of 2018

Just stopping by to wish you well Derrick and hoping you will come by to update soon.

Happy holidays, Derrick