Here are the books:

Sam Jones’s favorite books »

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Primary:
Stephen King — From a Buick 8
Elizabeth Kostova — The Historian
Robert A. Heinlein — Stranger in a Strange Land
Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five
Richard Adams — Watership Down
Joseph Heller — Catch-22
Scott Hahn — A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture
J. D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye
Henry Petroski — The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance
Terry Pratchett — Going Postal
Iain M. Banks — Matter
Stephen King — On Writing

Alternates:
Margaret Atwood — The Handmaid’s Tale
F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby

I think I have a decent mix of genres, some hard and easy books. The Historian and Stranger in a Strange Land were on last year’s list, but I didn’t get around to them. And yes, I do have a history of the pencil on my list as a book I’ve wanted to read for some time…

Should be fun! I’ll be keeping track on my 2012 Reading page here, and you can also follow my reading updates on Goodreads.

Harry Turtledove — How Few Remain
The first novel in Turtledove’s Southern Victory alternate history series. Basically: What if Robert E. Lee’s messenger had never lost Special Order 191, the details of the South’s invasion which Union soldiers found and then used to stop the army’s march? What if the Confederacy had then gone on to win the Civil War? This reads like I imagine any historical novel might — I could see the events in this series being straight up historical fiction. I went on to read the next novel in the series, which details WWI in this altered timeline. I own the rest of the series and hope to revisit it this year.

Alan’s father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine—he kept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune teller, and an island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father’s slopes, Mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator’s three-prong outlet. He hung it over the mantel, using two hooks and a level to make sure that it came out perfectly even.

Walter M. Miller Jr. — A Canticle for Leibowitz
After a devastating nuclear war, a Catholic monastery in the American Southwest devotes itself to preserving what scientific knowledge can be saved from pre-war humanity, through the rebuilding of civilization over the centuries following the war. Quite well-written, especially as this is the only novel Miller published in his lifetime. Notable for presenting Christianity mostly favorably in a science fiction. That was nice. A sequel was written, but published posthumously some thirty years after Canticle; I hope to read it soon. I hear Miller became disenchanted with the Church over the intervening decades and it shows, so we shall see how it turned out.

Cory Doctorow — Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
This book was… interesting. Two plots – one about setting Toronto up with a free, collectively-run public WiFi net. The other about Alan’s [or Adam's or Adrian's] less… conventional… history. I’ve shared paragraph from early in the first chapter to the right.

Scott Westerfeld — Uglies (The Uglies)
Excellent YA dystopian fiction. A few centuries in the future, humans mostly live in environmentally-friendly, post-scarcity cities. An age-based caste system divides the children and young adults from the rest of society; at the age of sixteen, young Uglies undergo cosmetic surgery to become Pretties and join the city proper, where they spend most of their time on partying and other recreational activities. But all [dun dun dunnnnn] is not as it seems.

Judith Lindbergh — The Thrall’s Tale
The Viking colonization of Greenland, as told from a slaves point of view. Very much not your typical rollicking Viking fiction of raids and battle-glory; a good counterpoint to The Long Ships, one of my favorite books and another that you should check out. The most interesting aspect of this book [to me] was actually the writing style. Lindbergh writes almost as if this is a poem without line breaks; there is a fascinating rhythm to her prose that had me nodding my head with the beat as I read.

Cormac McCarthy — The Road
Not a single quotation mark anywhere! The writing style was unusual enough to keep my attention, and the father’s relationship with his son is heartwarming. A good post-apocalyptic world without the all-out action feel you get from post-apocalyptic movies.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Aldous Huxley — Brave New World
This book could easily be read as a straight metaphor for modern American society. Americans, like the residents of Brave New World, tend to live in a panem et circenses fashion: with plentiful food and quick-access entertainment and consumerism, who really cares what’s really happening in the world? Worried about the future? Take another dose of soma or watch the latest American Idol.

Frank Herbert — Dune
One of those seminal science fiction works which seem to be required reading [literally: my sister-in-law is required to read it for her science fiction literature class], yet which I managed to reach the age of 27 without picking up. I am glad I finally got around to it; as with much good scifi, Dune paints a broad, beautiful landscape of a setting for its events. Also, the “Litany Against Fear” is one of those little poetic… things… that I love about good science fiction/space opera.

Ursula K. Le Guin — Rocannon’s World
A good medieval fiction — set on another planet in an interstellar society in the midst of a civil war. The first novel of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, I mainly picked this up to work my way up to the more famous books in the series [The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed], but I ended up really enjoying Rocannon’s World and the other short novels leading up to the heavy hitters. In fact, I have been struggling to get immersed in Left Hand, but I had no trouble at all whipping through the preceding books with joy.

I quite liked all nine books I read, which is nice. Several were the beginning of series which I then finished out or at least continued.

Without further ado, here are the books I finished:

Sam Jones’s favorite books »

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Harry Turtledove — How Few Remain
Walter M. Miller Jr. — A Canticle for Liebowitz
Cory Doctorow — Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Scott Westerfeld — Uglies
Judith Lindbergh — The Thrall’s Tale
Cormac McCarthy — The Road
Aldous Huxley — Brave New World
Frank Herbert — Dune
Ursula K. Le Guin — Rocannon’s World

Stay tuned for my 2012 list!

I decided to remote into my home computer, my eight-year-old son was on so I figured I would mess with him.

Is SpaceX Changing the Rocket Equation?

569 days after he was arrested, detained, and held in isolation, Bradley Manning gets a date in court for a pre-trial hearing to see if the government has enough evidence to charge him. (via The Agitator)

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. — C. S. Lewis

“A great misconception: the idea that cash changing hands is the only measure of a payment”

Many people would say that since I have not paid for these services, I have no right to complain about them or work to get the companies to change them. A common refrain is: “It’s free – if you don’t like it, don’t use it.” This is wrong and illustrates a great misconception: the idea that cash changing hands is the only measure of a payment. These people apparently believe these services are created as a charitable gift to the world. Something everyone needs to understand is this: you are not Google’s customer, or Facebook’s customer, or any other ad-based website’s customer. You are their product; they sell your eyes and screen real estate to advertisers, their real customers. The free service you use is there to get you to the site where you will see the ads. So that’s one way you pay the service back: ad impressions (and clicks if you like the ad).

At the same time, every piece of data I store in these services is analyzed. Every Facebook post, every email I send or receive, is checked over to get an idea of what I like and how best to advertise to me, and also aggregated to get a feel for the whole market — invaluable data for advertisers. This is another way I pay the service back: loads of personal data to be mined to sell more ads.

“If someone can share with most of their friends by posting on a service, but has to inform me separately… they won’t bother. I’ll just be out of the loop.”

Finally, especially in the case of social networking (but also for any tangential site that happens to have the concept of “friends”), my very presence on the site is a massive incentive for my circle of friends and acquaintances to join. What use would Facebook have if I didn’t know anyone there? This is also a nail in the coffin of “just don’t use the service”: what real alternative is there to Facebook? If I leave Facebook for G+, I lose most of Facebook’s utility since only a fraction of my friends are on G+. In the real world, systems inter-operate; I can leave my cell phone company for another, and still call the same people I used to; not so on the Web. This leaves the option of just not using that class of service at all, but these very same services are rapidly making fall-back impossible. In danah boyd’s article about G+’s “real name” policy (the comments on which are why I am writing this post), sapphire paw leaves this comment: “If someone can share with most of their friends by posting on a service, but has to inform me separately… they won’t bother. I’ll just be out of the loop.”

Note that the third point (my presence as incentive to join) is another way for the companies to use the content I generate; if I didn’t post to Facebook, then the value of my presence plummets as if I were not there at all.

So I have listed here three concrete ways in which I pay a free service like GMail and G+ and Facebook for the use of their services. This gives me all the justification I need to haggle, to complain, to try to change aspects of these services, just as I would in any other business transaction.

Two Iain M. Banks Culture novels: Surface Detail and Matter
Singularity Sky and Glasshouse by Charles Stross
First four books of The Change by S. M. Stirling: Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, A Meeting at Corvallis, and The Sunrise Lands
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
The Man Cave Book by Mike Yost and Jeff Wilser
Master & Commander by Patrick O’Brian

I LOVE Iain Banks – the Culture has to be one of my favorite science fiction settings. I enjoyed Stross’s Accelerando, so I have high hopes for the rest of his books. I was surprised to see a Discworld book (Going Postal) on NPR’s reader poll of the top 100 SFF books last week, so I figured it would be a worthwhile buy. A friend has been recommending Perdido Street Station to me for months now; happy to have a chance to read it. I read Master & Commander in high school on my orchestra director’s recommendation and remember really liking it, so I want to try to get into that series again. And who could resist a book entirely about man caves? Some good stuff in there.

• I don’t think I have ever seen more blatant pandering than I saw from Bachmann and Pawlenty. Every single answer from them seemed to be “I used to do/be [x], so I know how you feel.”
• Mitt Romney had the most “Presidential” feel.
• Newt Gingrich was surprisingly well-spoken, and had a couple good points. His NASA remarks were spot-on.
• Ron Paul had the best answers, but the short-answer format wasn’t kind to him; he seemed to ramble a bit in trying to cover all his bases.
• Herman Cain shot himself in the foot on the question of Muslims in his potential administration.
• Santorum was a forgettable neocon.
• Ron Paul was the only one to admit our problems (economic and other) predate the Obama presidency.
• Ron Paul was the only one to assert that it is up to the President when the troops come home.
• Ron Paul was the only one with any impression of sincerity.
• The moderator was terrible; he grunted all through the answers, and was ineffectual at time management or holding the debaters to the actual questions asked.
• I don’t like this format of cherry-picking questions for specific candidates. All seven candidates should have had a shot at each question – how am I supposed to compare them reliably based on this?

I have been maimed.

I recently moved to a new employer, and the move has handicapped me.

My new employer requires cell phones to be left in one’s car, in the parking lot (for good reasons which aren’t directly germane here). Several inherent abilities I have taken for granted are simply gone. My avenues of communication have been reduced to email and an inferior form of voice. I cannot check up on world news and internet forums while walking to the restroom. I cannot update my wife on my day (or ask her about hers) in real-time while heating water for tea. For the first time in years, I have actually had to give my work number out to mechanics. If I have to make a personal phone call, I cannot simply step out in the hall – I have to choose between a lengthy walk to the parking lot or just using my tethered-to-the-wall desk phone.

My cell phone has become an extension of my body and my mind. I was baffled last week when I was away from my desk and a coworker asked me for a phone number I have. It took me a few seconds to realize I actually had to walk back to my desk (on another floor) to look the number up on my computer — I couldn’t just pull my phone out and start typing the person’s name. Scott Adams coined a term that I think fits this well: exobrain. My phone has become an extension of my body, at least as far as my subconscious is concerned. I have used it to augment my own communication abilities, memory, etc.

I am not an amputee, so I cannot empirically verify this, but I expect that the feeling I experience when I reach for my exobrain and find it missing is at least superficially similar to the feeling experienced when someone who recently lost their arm below the elbow reaches for their coffee cup and misses. There is such a mental disconnect while my brain reminds me that no, I don’t have those capabilities right now and I should just stand and watch the microwave timer count down.

Harry Turtledove — How Few Remain
Robert A. Heinlein — Stranger in a Strange Land
Douglas R. Hofstadter — Godel, Escher, Bach
Susanna Clarke — Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Walter M. Miller Jr. — A Canticle for Liebowitz
Cory Doctorow — Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Scott Westerfeld — Uglies
Judith Lindbergh — The Thrall’s Tale
Cormac McCarthy — The Road
Aldous Huxley — Brave New World
Frank Herbert — Dune
Rafael Yglesias — Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil

Alternates (in case you can’t read one of the others for some reason, or you end up hating it three chapters in):

Ursula K. Le Guin — Rocannon’s World
Elizabeth Kostova — The Historian

The Book Addicts group on Goodreads is having a giveaway related to this, too. Anyone who completes their twelve books by the end of 2011 is entered to win a gift card to an online bookstore of their choice. Full rules here. This is my profile if you’d like to be my friend.

1. Best books of 2010? The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein as well as both of the Cynthia Voigt books I read (Homecoming and Dicey’s Song). There was just no way I could choose between the three – all are amazing and highly recommended to anyone, young or old.

2. Worst book of 2010? I didn’t have any books this year that I actively disliked. I suppose the closest would be The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. The story was pretty interesting, but the misogynistic narrator and protagonist got to me a bit — and I’m fairly sure it wasn’t a plot point, but just Asimov showing through.

3. Most Disappointing Book of 2010? The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, easily. I’ve looked forward to this for a while, as it’s a steampunk setting (I hadn’t read any steampunk before this), but I just really don’t care for Bruce Sterling’s writing. I already didn’t much care for Heavy Weather earlier in the year, and I was looking forward to The Difference Engine far more. The writing style was awesome in parts and horrible in others – I’m guessing those match up to the parts each author wrote, respectively.

4. Most surprising (in a good way!) book of 2010? Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. I finally read this at Lauren‘s behest, and I’m thankful I did. Really, now, people, why are you all so down on this book? It was perfectly good! I could not find any major things to complain about. The film was good, too.

5. Book you recommended to people most in 2010? Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It’s a modern YA version of 1984, and I think it hits 21st century America perfectly. I stayed up till 3 am to read it in one night, and I think everyone should do the same, young or old.

6. Best series you discovered in 2010? This is another tie with Cynthia Voigt’s Tillerman cycle, this time with Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I had been planning to read King’s series for a long time and finally did, and it was great. Now I want to read the rest of his books so I pick up all the backstory (Dark Tower ties many of them together very well).

7. Favorite new authors you discovered in 2010? I’m going to choose Stephen King. After reading his Dark Tower series, I really want to go read most of his other books to see all the references. Honorable mention to Cory Doctorow and Cynthia Voigt.

8. Most hilarious read of 2010? This pretty much has to go to The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde) by default, as the only comedic book I read this year.

9. Most thrilling, unputdownable book in 2010? Little Brother – it’s the only one I stayed up way too late to read (and well worth it!)

10. Book you most anticipated in 2010? The Dark Tower series – and it fulfilled all my hopes!

11. Favorite cover of a book you read in 2010?

12. Most memorable character in 2010? Probably Robert Feynman, though he had an unfair advantage in my reading a whole book of letters he wrote. Of the fiction, I suppose Dicey Tillerman, of Homecoming and Dicey’s Song. Close second to Roland Deschain of the Dark Tower novels.

13. Most beautifully written book in 2010? I think I’m going to go with The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. It keeps moving and keeps you interested in what is at heart a long bout of fishing.

14. Book that had the greatest impact on you in 2010? Little Brother, definitely. Cory Doctorow was able to perfectly crystallize American culture right now as it pertains to the so-called “War on Terror” and the immense powers and freedoms we seem happy to give up to our mostly-corrupt government.

15. Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2010 to finally read? Given how decently good it turned out to be, Twilight.

So what about you? What were some of the best books you read this year?