Glibertarians.com 2017 Archive

Tag: Books

  • What are we reading? November 2017

    Good day, jive turkeys! Now that we have you wrapped in a wooly blanket of tryptophan and some kind of gluttony-related guilt. We would like to discuss your reading habits.

    SugarFree

    My October horror kick held on through November. I read my first John Farris book. As much as I like the 70s and 80s horror novel boom, I missed Farris somehow. His biggest claim to fame is The Fury, the novel adapted into the film of the same name by Brian DePalma–DePalma and Amy Irving’s second swing at the telekinetic teen revenge drama that came out right after the masterful Carrie. I read All The Heads Turn As The Hunt Goes By, a pleasing blend of High Gothic’s Cursed Family, voodoo, and H. Rider Haggard’s She Who Must Be Obeyed. It starts strong, slows down for a good bit of exposition and then all hell breaks loose. Highly entertaining.

    Less so, was Colin Wilson ham-handed attempt at Lovecraft, The Mind Parasites. Written on a Dare from August Derleth after Wilson insulted Lovecraft, The Mind Parasites starts off well enough–Cyclopean cities pre-dating human civilization, madness, industrial psychology and mescaline–but collapses in a confused mess of vast mental powers unlocked through discovery and resistance to the titular Mind Parasites. If you are going to delve into Wilson, The Space Vampires is the way to go, even if, for some deranged reason, you aren’t a fan of Tobe Hooper’s lunatic 1985 adaption as Lifeforce, that movie people only watch for the nude mute space vampire girl that nearly destroys London. (Link is SFW)

    jesse

    I’ve been a bit audiobook heavy this month with Victor Gischler – Ink Mage: A Fire Beneath the Skin, (Book 1), Michael Crichton – The Great Train Robbery, and A. G. Riddle – Pandemic: The Extinction Files, (Book 1) Crichton remains a favorite light read and I’d never gotten to TGTR. The content was different than I expected but the pacing, informativeness and balance of tension and humor were exactly what I hope for when picking up a Crichton novel. Ink Mage was a solid fantasy novel that works fairly well as a standalone, but left enough hanging to make the sequel seem worthwhile. A young woman’s life is torn away from her by quisling traitors and by god she’s gonna get her duchy back. Pandemic actually reads (listens?) like a Crichton novel, although not quite to the level of one. If you like fictional conspiracies, pandemics and heroic epidemiologists, this may be the book for you.

    Napoleon Hill – Outwitting the Devil. Napoleon Hill is the godfather of the self-help movement and (allegedly) a “fraudster.” Outwitting the Devil was written around the same time as his other works but was withheld from publication until everyone remotely associated with it had died. It’s a fascinating bit of autobiography and a rambling conversation with the Devil about what the Devil does to trip people up. My mother had started reading it and put it down because it was too weird (this is a woman who was telling anyone who would listen that a tetrad of blood moons on Jewish holidays over an arbitrary period of time was a portent of doom!). I’m glad I took it off her hands because while it’s an absolute hate-read, it’s an interesting insight into the completely bonkers source of modern self-help.

    Kai Ashante Wilson – A Taste of Honey is a short novel by the same author as The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. These stories take place in a future earth with a set of gods who are really just more genetically advanced humans and mortals who are pretty standard issue, but have a bit of mutagenic witchery to them. Wilson has been lauded for queer characters of color enough that I thought I’d find Sorcerer a hamfisted trainwreck, but the diversity was handled deftly and never got in the way of storytelling. When I saw another book out, I picked it up immediately and have been delighted by the level of world-building Wilson is able to do in ~160 pages.

    Brett L

    What did I read this month? Ah yes, Mark Lawrence’s collection of shorts set in the Broken Empire world, Road Brothers. Two of these were really good and added to the whole Mark Lawrence does a great job of standing traditional fantasy on its head. The rest were not bad. The one featuring Jorg’s younger brother alive is — a bit heavy-handed.

    I also read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. I have read a good bit of the Gulag Archipelago, but this book has been much discussed by Jesse in particular of late. It seems like another planet where people could be worked and/or starved and/or beaten to death with great regularity for basically being exposed to other cultures. I had forgotten just how banal it all seems on the page there.

    JW

    Did you know that there’s 120 calories per serving for these Grape Nuts Flakes?

    Old Man With Candy

    SP laughs her ass off every time she sees the books in the bathroom. I’m currently immersed in Technology for Waterborne Coatings, which I got at a book sale for a buck. It’s delightful, every chapter making me wonder what’s going to happen next.

    A mystery in my life is who sent me Cork Dork, a saga of a writer’s quest to achieve the status of Master Sommelier. I know quite a few of the people she meets or discusses in this book, and if you want an account of all of the things I hated about the world of fine wine, it’s here. All of the shallowness, pretension, unhealthy obsession, gaudy show-off, and wasted lives are on display. Interestingly, at some points, you can see the author starting to face some basic economics, then quickly back away. One telling point for me was the New York restaurant-centric approach, which manages to miss the best sommeliers, Masters of Wine, wine lists, wine writers, and importers in the US- her mentors had never heard of Ann Noble, for example, which is like finding physicists who never heard of Poincaré. I have been sorely tempted to write about wine and how to avoid the sort of shit the author rolls around in. (And yes, I thought “Sideways” was an absolutely terrible movie)

    Riven

    I’m still working on The Skinner by Neal Asher. It’s been a busy month, so I’ve probably only read another chapter or two since weighing in last month. Wah wah. Maybe I’ll get more read this weekend while visiting in the in-laws?

    SP

    I’ve been enjoying revisiting the Cliff Janeway mystery series by John Dunning. I’d forgotten what a pleasure they are to read.

    Janeway is based in Denver, and although somewhat predictable in plot, I love the main character and I love the book seller tidbits sprinkled throughout. In a past life, I was tangentially involved in the rare and antiquarian book trade and these details are such fun.

    I listened to one volume from Audible while doing a cross-country drive recently. It was brilliantly read by George Guidall, perhaps my favorite book narrator of all time. It’s super handy that the audio book syncs with the e-book; a seamless transition from one device or location to the next.

     

  • What are we reading? October 2017

    It is time once again to pretend that we have education and class. Our one chance of getting invited to cocktail parties… Although I don’t know anyone who invites trashlit, science books, or self-improvement tomes to cocktail parties. We also want to know what you’re reading. Library Scientist or not, SF is going to run out of books to feed us some day.

    SugarFree

    October means I’m reading horror.

    Given the hype over the new movie (which I haven’t found a good copy to pirate seen yet,) I felt compelled to read It, probably for the 12th time since high school. It really is too bad about, ahem, that scene, because, without it, the huge novel could be pushed on anyone who ever wondered what Stephen King’s success was all about. It combines pretty much everything good King ever had to say with some of his best writing–even if a ruthless editor could have improved it by trimming away 100,000 words and a squicky sewer gangbang.

    On the other end of the scale, I also read Cujo. For such a King fan, I just never got around to Cujo, I think because someone warned me off of it. Whoever you were, you were totally right. Cujo is It as seen through a mirror darkly. At best a novella, the simple premise of Cujo is stretched kicking and screaming and biting and pissing itself to an unnecessary novel length with a boring cast of stock Maine characters who add nothing to the core conflict between mother, child and monster dog. The husband’s failing ad agency, the abusive father of the family that owns the dog, the hacky lottery ticket that sets up the deserted farm for the Cujo attack, the foul-mouthed drunk down the way who is Cujo’s first victim, and even the shithead who the mother had an affair with all mean nothing to the overall story. And the ham-fingered way King tries to tie a rabid dog back to Frank Dodd, the Castle Rock serial killer from The Dead Zone, only reminds the reader that they are reading a far, far inferior book (as does the attempt to bring back the third-person omniscient and time-bending narration from Carrie as an attempt at world-weariness.) Stephen King has admitted to being so out-of-his-mind drunk during this period that he has no conscious memory of writing the book whatsoever. He’s either lying to save face or alcoholism has a rare blessing after all.

    And since I was on a roll, I read two more 1970s books-to-movies (watching the movies again, of course, just like It and Cujo.) The Howling by Gary Brandner, the source novel for the 1981 movie of the same name–you know, the one where Elliot’s mom from E.T. turns into a Lhasa Apso–and Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg, made into 1987’s Angel Heart, where De Niro peels an egg while badly in need of a manicure and Mickey Rourke gives the second oldest Huxtable girl the Hottest Cosby of them all. The Howling is fairly mediocre, a they shouldn’t have gone there combined with man, rednecks are pretty creepy; the movie is far superior, with a kinky edge that the book couldn’t find even though it features much more werewolf sex. Falling Angel is very, very well written, and would have been a revelation to read in 1978, but decades of hard-boiled wizards has taken the punch out of its early fusion of Raymond Chandler and Dennis Wheatley.

    Brett L.

    I really don’t seem to have read much this month. Other than a couple of RFPs that included 180 page appendices on the unsuitability of their current system. Holy crap. Whoever did the consulting work on that study must have had a 2 page per thousand dollar rule. I’m sure they were aiming for exhaustive, but only reached exhausting. I did work my way through three of Tim Dorsey’s Serge Storms novels: The Big Bamboo, Hurricane Punch, and Atomic Lobster, because the Apple book store thingy had a collection and I had credits from some class action lawsuit. Anyhow, I enjoy the billion and one Florida facts Dorsey manages to cram into each book, and with several books taking place or passing through the Tampa Bay area, I’ve learned a lot of trivia about my local area. Also, in the last two, Dorsey took Serge back to doing what he does best: killing Florida Man inventively. These are fun leisure reading with all of the Florida and none of the sanctimony of that other Florida novelist from Miami.

    I also read The Skinner by Neal Asher, on SF’s recommendation. Not to steal any of Riven’s thunder, I’ll just say that Spatterjay is a fucked up universe. I’ll probably work my way through the whole thing eventually, but disembodied heads that skitter and giant killer space crabs are merely two of a host of violent and difficult to kill denizens. I will eventually work my way through more. Its good space opera that seems to center on “how can I buff these characters so I can kill them at least twice?” Which is actually a hell of a way to build a universe.

    I am listening to Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss based on a recommendation out of the comments (someone gave RC Dean credit, but if I’m wrong please correct me). Since everything is a hostage crisis negotiation when you have two toddlers, this may be the most helpful book I’ve ever read. The unfortunate downside is that I don’t have a SWAT team to bail me out when I make a mistake. Sometimes, I wish there was.

    jesse.in.mb

    Joe Abercrombie – The Blade Itself, so Brett read it last month and I largely agree with his assessment. I noticed several of you came to Abercrombie’s defense and I may be willing to pick up the next book in the series based on that, but there was some interesting world building and by the end of the book I wasn’t excited to see where the grand adventure would take me.

    Marie Kondo – Spark Joy is more practical than her declutterer’s manifesto The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I’m not entirely sure that I got that much more out of it than the first book. My book collection is now about 1/4 of what it was previously (Salvation Army ended up with just shy of 200 used books this weekend), and I can actually find clothes in my cabinet and closet, so I’m kinda digging the philosophy.

    Tom Merritt – Pilot X seems to be very much a play on Doctor Who plot and themes and a few times dropped some Easter Eggs related to the show “Spoilers sweeties” and the like. The story is fun and the narrator, Kevin T. Collins does a great job of bringing the story to life. The one down side is that I couldn’t stop thinking about how much the story reminded me of a Who arc.

    JW

    JW has been reading the back of a box of Post Toasties. Did you know they have thiamine, niacin, and riboflavin?

    Old Man With Candy

    I will make two confessions: first, the most interesting book I read this month was Handbook of Ring-Opening Polymerization. From the title, I thought it would be about anal sex, but I was mistaken. Nonetheless, excellent content if you’re into this sort of thing. I am tempted to experiment with microemulsification…

    Second, I never actually did read Primary Colors when it came out. I have corrected this. It’s certainly a good cynical look inside the Clinton campaign of 1996, surprisingly so for a liberal author. But my main complaint was, not nearly cynical enough.

    Riven

    So, I’m still working through The Skinner by Neal Asher, a SugarFree recommendation. I’m only about a quarter of the way through it so far as my free time this last month has definitely been on the short side. Additionally, it took me a while to “get into” this book. I was probably 10% in before things started to click into place, and the confusion surrounding the universe in which the book is set cleared to the point I could read it enjoyably. Not to say that Asher isn’t still introducing new creatures, concepts, etc., just that I think I finally have a basic grasp of the characters (and there are a lot of them) and how they relate to each other. So far the bulk of the action has taken place on one specific world, but there are references to other characters on other worlds and there have been a few scenes set off this main world, as well. It’s making for an interesting universe so far, to say the least. There are a lot of different plots all happening at the same time, and it’s sometimes difficult to see how one or another are going to tie in together. There’s still plenty of the book left for it all to come together and make some sense, though, and I can be patient.

    SugarFree here… I made this handy chart to Neal Asher’s Polity Universe that should easily clear up any questions about continuity or reading order:

     

  • What are we reading? June 2017

    *looks up from book* Oh, it’s you. *frowns slightly, returns to reading*

    SugarFree

    Finished Mira Grant‘s Newsflesh trilogy–Feed, Deadline, Blackout–and the various in-universe short stories collected in Rise. All the novels and a few of the shorter pieces in Rise were nominated for Hugo awards so there has been quite a bit of buzz about this series since Feed came out in 2010, but they are set in a post-zombie apocalypse and I have been suffering rather severe zombie-fatigue. Set 20 years or so after a viral zombie outbreak that killed around a 1/3 of Americans, crusading bloggers are chosen to be in the press pool for a charismatic young Senator running for President of the United States. The CDC basically runs the country through strict containment laws and thick layers of security theater. Complications on the campaign trail ensue, as they always do.

    The set-up is a bit derivative, stealing a bit of Bug Jack Barron via Transmetropolitan, but Grant does a pretty good job convincing even a cynic that such a thing as a honest reporter can exist. And that a public who is trying to survive in a much more deadly world would actually care what a reporter had to say. But in a literary universe where the dead walk, some suspension of belief is required up front. And the general anti-government and individualist outlook of the work will be pleasing to the libertarian mindset.

    Grant is a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, who also publishes under her real name. The Newsflesh material is her one big hit and the in-universe short stories show her milking it for all it’s worth, and as a result the stories are generally-enjoyable-shading-to-disposable. But, overall, I look forward to reading more of her work.

    jesse.in.mb

    Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day: Always looking to up my baking game a bit, especially since the doctor I work for (a former professional chef) was convinced by his partner to get back into baking. I was actually led to Reinhart by Warty suggesting I make a struan. That shit’s tasty, yo. Artisan Breads Every Day does a solid job of simplifying some of the techniques he presented in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice although I’d like more details on prepping a wet sourdough starter into a stiffer biga or pâte fermentée. It’s times like this I was working with a paper book so I could math in the margins.

    Ender’s Game Alive: A solid full-cast recording of Ender’s Game, I listened to this while frittering time in a Tucson hotel. It’s been a long-ass time since I read Ender’s Game and it made me want to try reading Speaker for the Dead again, but I remember picking it up getting bored as fuck and putting it back down almost immediately last time, so maybe not. Bonus points for it being under Audible’s gratis options.

    Beach Lawyer by Avery Duff: This ended up being my Kindle Firsts choice and it was ideal airplane reading. The two attractive male alpha lawyers jockeying for position plot was a bit tired, but it’s always fun reading a novel that’s set in your stomping grounds and Duff’s descriptions of locale are vivid and right on.

    JW

    JW is currently reading his palm…wait, that’s not reading! Jesus, dude, get a room.

    Old Man With Candy

    SP gifted me with a copy of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, which has been reviewed and discussed so  many times… wait a minute, it looks like she’s talking about it below. Damn, I can’t step on her toes or I’ll be catbutted.

    And I am plowing into a couple of sci fi books that SugarFree gave me, starting with Up the Line by Robert Silverberg, a time travel novel which, unlike Heinlein’s later efforts, does not involve sex with the protagonist’s mother and daughters. But there IS plenty of sex because, after all, Robert Silverberg. The writing is slick and vivid.

    Riven

    In our last installment, I mentioned that I was still working on cracking the cover of Dead Witch Walking by Kim Harrison, recommended to me by SugarFree. I have since read every book and short story in “The Hollows” series except the lately published prequel, The Turn, which I only just started yesterday morning. It was a fun and satisfying series: fantasy elements made modern, tastefully written smut scenes that only occasionally take place in bedrooms, and a bit of a who-dun-it feel. I haven’t been able to put them down since I started–even the short stories are compelling. The characters don’t always act in predictable ways (to the reader or to other characters) and wacky hijinks abound from misunderstandings, magical anomalies, and the like. You could argue that the books tend to be a little formulaic as time goes on: trouble rears its ugly head, tension builds, our plucky protagonist Rachel finds that the trouble is actually worse than we’d previously thought, but somehow, someway… everything ends up being alright. Or, y’know, especially difficult problems get carried over into the next book. Ongoing issues don’t just fade away; Harrison neatly wraps them up, sometimes in a book or three, sometimes spanning the entire series. Overall, this was a grand adventure of a series, full of capers and intrigue, a principled protagonist who stuck to her guns, and I’m sorry to see it end–even though I know it can’t go on forever, which is a lasting message from the series, itself.

    Brett L.

    I slogged my way through The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel  by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland and — how can I put this… Take the least interesting parts of The Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle and all of the knowledge dumping of Seveneves without the cool final two chapter payoff and that’s this book. If you have the rest of the summer to kill and don’t mind wandering through poor staging/narrator choices and far too many nerd jokes, this is a two-star effort from a five-star writer. The short, non-spoilerish version is that magic waned until a bright MIT guy invented a chamber where the quantum wave function can’t collapse (for those of you who know quantum mechanics, just stick with me here) like the Schroedinger Gedankenerfahrung that everyone has heard enough about to use as a plot device. Anyhow, time travel, not nearly enough adventure, and quasi-immortal German bankers. Its actually worse than it sounds. Seriously, don’t read it.

    On the other hand, I just picked up Mark Lawrence’s latest work Red Sister, which is already better. If you’re not familiar with his post-apocalyptic, semi-magical Europe double trilogy (two trilogies telling two complete, but overlapping stories), I highly recommend them. Look for a more complete review next month.

    SP

    This month I’m deep into The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. I’ve followed Pinker for many years on edge.org and he’s always fascinating.

    Also reading The Haywire Heart by Chris Case, John Mandrola MD (an electrophysiologist I follow online), and Lennard Zinn. This is a very interesting look at how intense physical training can bring on arrhythmias in endurance athletes as they age. (I don’t personally need to worry about this particular problem.)

    And, YEA!, the new Scot Harvath novel, Use of Force, from Brad Thor arrived. You should get it.

    sloopyinca

    Sloop is reading The Neverending Story and contemplating Xeno’s paradox.

    Gojira

    Gojira gets enough fiction from movies, and is currently re-reading one of his top 3 favorite non-fiction books, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia.

    Heroic Mulatto

    Summer reading for an upcoming project:

    Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques to Build Intelligent Systems and Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit.

    WebDominatrix

    I am currently re-reading The Dictator’s Handbook, which has shifted the way I approach business and marketing, as I’ve seen a lot similarities in the business world.

    I’m also reading Hit Makers about how trends happen.

  • What are we reading? May 2017

    It’s the last Friday of the Month, which means it’s time once again for Oprah’s The Glibs’ Book Club:

    SugarFree

    I’ve been reading the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch off of jesse’s recommendation. I’m through the fifth book and I am really enjoying it. It’s a deft mash-up of The Dresden Files and British police procedurals. I’m not sure how many books he is shooting for, but the formula is set-up for dozens and dozens if he felt like it. And the series is popular enough to have tie-in comics series. The most baffling part of reading them is that it hasn’t been made into a TV series yet. Aaronovitch started as a TV writer and he has the rhythms of serial television down pat.

    Speaking of The Dresden Files, I also read Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series this month. I liked them quite a bit. They magnify both Butcher’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer. His battle and fight scene are superb; his character’s relationships with women range from baffled to mildly horrified. People are either really, really good or really, really bad; Butcher doesn’t care much for subtle. They are big books, widescreen epics that manage to pull-off the central conceit entertainingly, despite leaning on many of the most groan-worthy of fantasy conventions.

    jesse.in.mb

    Put a hustle on to finish the books from last month as this month’s What are we reading? approached, and have mostly succeeded (Luz Gabas writes better sex than Dan Simmons’ turgid descriptions of erections could hope to match). I’m lollygagging on picking the next read as Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 has been staring at me (literally one eye is poking out from my shelf) for years, and I want to reread Gaiman’s American Gods before I watch the series or Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman before the movie comes out. Ultimately I’ll probably settle on Beach Lawyer by Avery Duff, part of the Kindle First early release program for novels (underrated Prime perk). As far as I can tell many of the novels they select are blander versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with heavy themes of violence against women. Zygmunt Miloszewski’s Rage was the most emblematic of this trend.

     

    JW

    He dead.

    Old Man With Candy

    I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that my reading this month, beyond technical stuff, has comprised re-reading. I have to get out more. Nonetheless, I’m rereading these because I think they’re damn good.

    Tom O’Bedlam is very underrated scifi written by Robert Silverberg, a very underrated writer. Ever since reading Stephen Vincent Benet’s “By the Waters of Babylon” when I was a kid, I’ve had a deep love for post-apocalyptic stories. And I also have a weakness for the sort of novel that develops several different storylines, then skillfully brings them together at the end. Combine that with hallucinogenic ecstasy and a deliciously ambiguous conclusion, this is my favorite Silverberg and a novel that seems almost tailor-made for my tastes in fiction. Chungira-he-will-come, he will come.

    My geeky side drew me to Uncertainty, a retelling of the early history of quantum mechanics. The book’s focus is much more on the personalities and dynamics of the theory’s origins than any explanation of the wonderful weirdness of the new physics, which was just fine for me- get your physics from Feynman. The author, David Lindley, transforms the names I only knew from various equations and theories into three dimensional human beings. As a bonus, he shares my scorn for the pomos and sociological types who, without any actual understanding of the uncertainty principle, love to invoke it to support their confused world-views.

    Riven:

    Still reading Dead Witch Walking… But I swear I’m actually going to start it this weekend. Pinky-promise.

    Brett L:

    I blew through the latest installment of Nathan Lowell’s Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series To Fire Called. Although the books have gotten a little darker, and certainly the universe a little deeper since Quarter Share, it remains the same fun kind of low-calorie high fun series you can inhale in short sittings, feel good about universes where they (mostly) live happily ever after, and capitalism works thanks to having to get a long way from habitable space before you can magically be somewhere else. I’m also slogging through Gaiman’s Norse Mythology.  As someone who liked a couple of his books but doesn’t think he’s THE towering literary figure of the 21st century that this is a labor of love where he has (thus far) failed to sway me to his love of the mythology. I remain entirely bored by the canon mythology. Stay tuned for June when I binge read Neal Stephenson’s attempt to jump into the (thus far British) “magic is real and there’s a government agency for that” genre. And I think in July I’ll be (based on the story arc as I understand it) hate reading Charlie Stross’s latest Laundry File like it was written by an ex-girlfriend I’m still not over.

    SP

    I tend to read several books at once, one of which is usually a mystery or spy thriller. While I’m waiting for the new Scot Harvath from Brad Thor (out on June 27), and the new Chief Inspector Gamache from Louise Penny (out on August 29), I’m reading through the V.I. Warshawski novels by Sara Paretsky. I’m currently on book 11, Blacklist. Set in Chicago and the western suburbs right after 9/11, the usually very lefty Vic is thrown into several puzzles involving events around the HUAC and complications from the Patriot Act. There is much to please a libertarian heart in this one, from diatribes against the gutting of the Bill of Rights to our heroine actively subverting the police. DO NOT read any of the reviews. They all seem to contain spoilers. (What’s up with that?!)

    Also in process: Daybook by Anne Truitt, a look into an artist’s  journals (recommended to me by an older artist I admire whom I was recently privileged to meet); and 3 Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way by Gene Bedell. It seems to be working. It’s been much easier to live with OMWC since I started this book.

    Banjos

    Banjos is currently reading Everybody Poops for the 127th time per her toddlers’ request. It is their most holy text.

    sloopyinca

    Sloop is reading The Neverending Story and will have an update when he’s done.

  • Milo and the Publishing Industry

    In December of last year, Simon & Schuster, one of the large traditional publishing houses known in the industry as the “Big Five” ( formerly Six, announced the upcoming publication of “Dangerous, an autobiography by “alt-right leader” “professional agitator” whatever, you know who he is Milo Yiannopoulos. The publishing world immediately proceeded to lose its damn mind. From preachy virtue signaling from literary review magazines to preachy virtue signaling from bestselling authors to preachy virtue signaling from Simon & Schuster’s own U.K. division, the last two months in the Publishing World have been nonstop outrage, boycotts, Twitter rants, and general hysteria.

    Undoubtedly, the bigwigs at Simon & Schuster were very relieved when they were given an easy out for severing ties with Milo after The Pederasty Incident. But now that his book deal has been canceled, the question is: Where will Milo go? And what does his choice mean for the publishing industry?

    It’s entirely possible that he will decide to just shelve Dangerous. But if he decides he wants to continue to pursue publication, he has two choices—try to court another traditional publisher, or self-publish his book. And which route he takes could have long-term effects on the industry as a whole.

    To better understand the implications of what direction Dangerous takes to publication, it’s important to understand the nature of the modern-day publishing industry. Until about ten years ago, publication via a traditional publishing house was considered the only legitimate means of publishing a book. Though the stigma of self-publishing has lessened slightly with the explosion of ebooks and hugely successful self-published authors like Andy Weir and Hugh Howey, for the most part, traditional publishing is still considered by the elites to be the only “true” form of publication. The Big Five have a stranglehold on brick-and-mortar bookstores, on libraries, on literary awards*, and even on bestseller lists (which by no means reflect a straightforward measure of sales). Everything about the industry is designed to give legacy publishers an advantage over digital imprints and independent authors who try to skirt the gatekeepers.

    Not unlike the Fourth Estate, publishing is suffering from the changes in consumer expectations brought on by the digital age. However, market analysis shows that despite predictions to the contrary, the digital age hasn’t killed traditional publishing just yet. But ebooks aren’t its only threat. An arguably bigger problem that may ultimately hasten the traditional houses’ demise is the disproportionate influence on the industry held by the progressive factions of what is colloquially known as “Book Twitter.”

    “Book Twitter” is an extremely vocal faction of readers, authors, editors, agents, small publishing houses,
    and others involved in the publishing industry that skew overwhelmingly left. They exist in an echo chamber, where each reverberating talking point bounces back and gets louder and louder. One refrain that became deafening over the last year is that all writing is inherently political, and as True Artists we have a Sacred Duty to preach Rightthink in any and every aspect of our lives. Thus, previously non-political, bestselling authors have been chiming in almost incessantly, contributing to the industry’s pronounced and rapid shift leftward.

    So what does this mean for Dangerous? It means that, regardless of the fact that the book hit #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list twice while still in preorder—despite the fact that there may (and undoubtedly will) be a huge consumer demand for his book— Dangerous is likely going to be a very tough sell for other traditional publishers, particularly any of the remaining four major houses. They saw what happened to Simon & Schuster over the last two months, and my prediction is that their desire to avoid controversy and save face with the insiders of their industry will outweigh any concerns for freedom of speech, and likely even the prospect of the monetary gain that could come from publishing his book.**

    Achtung! Those frosted tips are sharpWhich leaves self-publishing.

    If Milo chooses to self-publish Dangerous, it could be the first sign of a changing tide. The backlash that Simon & Schuster experienced over signing a deal with Milo is likely to continue with future book deals with other authors. Despite their exclamations to the contrary, considering their track record, it is almost certain that the rage machine will continue to work its way down the list of authors who are conservative, libertarian, or anywhere to the political right of Karl Marx (or at least Bernie Sanders), targeting them as proponents of hate speech who must be silenced for the good of society. And as long as the echo chamber continues to consist of prominent members of the traditional publishing industry, the Big Five will continue to be puppets to their whims.

    This means that as the traditional publishing industry grows increasingly leftist in nature, it seems likely that conservative and libertarian voices may start to shift towards an independent/self-publishing model. The implications this could have for the industry are multifold. First, it would likely mean that the slight increase in legitimacy that self-publishing has gained over the last few years will abruptly decrease, at least for the purposes of the gatekeepers (the aforementioned professional reviewers, brick-and-mortar bookstores/libraries and, of course, lists and awards). But additionally, as in the case of the declining legacy media, it would likely lead to a simultaneous increase in the market share of self-published books—particularly in nonfiction, a genre previously dominated by the Big Five. And as their sales dwindle, no amount of Rightthink will be able to keep them afloat. It will be Trump’s election all over again.

    The rage brigade of “Book Twitter” think they are saving traditional publishing by silencing voices they don’t agree with. But more than likely, they are hastening its decline.

    ———

    * I won’t go into the Rabid/Sad Puppies vs. Hugos drama, as that would be enough for another article entirely, and it’s already been covered in other places.

    ** The exception to this would be if there is an independent/small press that caters to a specifically conservative or right-wing audience that doesn’t mind the blowback from Pedophilia-gate. Which there may well be. I’ll be interested to see what comes out of the woodwork over the next few months.