2012-05-13: Small book haul
A few pre-orders, a special, and a book to make the minimum order for
Amazon shipping.
Gail Carriger — Soulless (sff)
Charlaine Harris — Living Dead in Dallas (sff)
Kameron Hurley — God's War (sff)
T.H. White — The Goshawk (non-fiction)
Contrary to how it may appear from the lack of new reviews, I have been
reading, but I've been slowly working on a book (an RPG sourcebook) that's
taking me a long time to read. I still have three more books from
vacation that I need to write reviews of, too. But there have been a lot
of distractions, such as getting back to video games.
The main distraction, though, has been that I've finally rotated off of
doing a bunch of more social projects at work and have gotten back to
serious coding, and that's been so much fun that it's been hard to
concentrate on anything else and I've been working rather more than 40
hours a week. Which also means that Debian is falling a bit by the
wayside at the moment, but I'm sure this will change with time. In the
meantime, expect even more new software releases.
2012-05-12: filter-syslog 2.2
This release adds support for a few additional rsyslogd output formats.
We're experimenting with different formats that give us saner dates, but
that required both changes to filter-syslog to understand them and a
tightening of some of the regexes to match the traditional format so that
it doesn't misinterpret the other formats.
The new formats added are rsyslogd's FileFormat and SyslogProtocol23Format
default templates.
This new support underscores what turned out to be the best architectural
design of filter-syslog: the separation of basic format parsing from the
rules. Because filter-syslog separates out the program name and log line,
I can add support for new formats without changing any rules. I wasn't
thinking about that at the time, but it turned out to be very important.
You can get the latest version from the
filter-syslog distribution page.
2012-05-11: krb5-strength 1.1
This was a bit of a last-minute project for this afternoon, since we
discovered some inconsistencies between our documentation and the rules
that our password strength checking was imposing. While I was at it, I
tightened some other rules that had been reported over the past couple of
years.
In the embedded CrackLib library, the minimum password length is now eight
characters, and a duplicated dictionary word is also rejected. In the
wrapper around the CrackLib call, krb5-strength also now checks for a
password formed by adding digits to the end of the username and rejects
that.
This release also allows building with the system CrackLib if one doesn't
mind the weaker checking, and fixes the internal CrackLib to use
consistent variable sizes on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. This will fix
interoperability issues with databases built on a platform with a
different native integer size.
There are also lots of updates to the build system, test infrastructure,
and portability layer, since it had been a while since I released this
package.
You can get the latest version from the
krb5-strength distribution page.
2012-05-11: rra-c-util 4.4
Lots of changes in this release, since it incorporates a bunch of
portability fixes to remctl by Jeffrey
Hutzelman and significant improvements to the PAM utility library and test
framework that will be in the next release of
pam-krb5.
The PAM utility library now does not append the PAM error if the provided
PAM status is PAM_SUCCESS, avoiding meaningless error messages.
The PAM test library now supports regular expression matching of output
and prompt lines. Support for the %* wildcard has been removed, since
regular expressions provide the same functionality in an improved way. As
part of this change, the structure of the output returned by the fakepam
pam_output function has changed, so callers that look directly at that
will need code changes.
The PAM test framework no longer copies the provided password to
PAM_AUTHTOK but instead provides separate configuration for setting
PAM_AUTHTOK and PAM_OLDAUTHTOK. This allows testing of different behavior
for prompting and stored passwords. There are also numerous other, more
minor improvements to the testing framework.
The Autoconf macros RRA_LIB_GSSAPI and RRA_LIB_KRB5 now pass --deps to
krb5-config if it's supported so that they link with all libraries by
default. This fixes some problems in some build situations. Pass
--enable-reduced-depends to configure to only link with libraries that are
used directly. RRA_LIB_GSSAPI also now falls back to manual probing if
gssapi isn't supported, rather than assuming GSS-API libraries are in the
default set.
There are also portability and cleanup improvements to the Kerberos and
remctl TAP add-ons, and the same changes here as in
C TAP Harness for suppressing
warnings about __attribute__ handling with some compilers.
Finally, several portability bugs in the network test suite were fixed.
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2012-05-11: C TAP Harness 1.12
After a fairly quiet last year with this project, I'm making quite a few
more releases this year.
This release fixes some remaining shell portability issues (avoiding
local) that I had intended to fix last release but didn't fix completely,
and documents a nasty interaction with backquotes and double-quotes with
here documents on Solaris. It also updates the handling of __attribute__
in tests/tap/macros.h to avoid warnings on more compilers and adds the
UNUSED macro. Finally, it fixes some minor output nits in the C TAP
library if bail is called after plan_lazy but before running any tests.
You can get the latest version from the
C TAP Harness distribution page.
2012-05-10: Review: Mockingjay
Review: Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
| Series |
Hunger Games #3 |
| Publisher |
Scholastic |
| Copyright |
September 2010 |
| ISBN |
0-439-02351-3 |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
390 |
Mockingjay is the third and final book in the
Hunger Games trilogy. Don't even think
about reading it without reading the previous two books, as you would miss
the core dynamic of change and growth in the series and have a
significantly inferior reading experience. As with
Catching Fire, I'm going to try to avoid
spoilers, but the continued life of some characters is an almost
unavoidable spoiler. The short review: I highly recommend the whole
series, particularly with this conclusion, and if you want to avoid any
spoilers, stop reading here and just read the whole trilogy. Then come
back.
I'm going to say up-front that I loved this book (better than any other in
the series), but not for being a uniformly excellent book. Rather, I
loved it despite several significant problems because it has moments that
are simply exceptional. It also attempts a breathtaking risky thematic
shift and direction of character development that I was completely not
expecting, and largely pulls it off. But more on that in a moment.
Flaws first. Mockingjay, like the whole series, is written in
first-person present tense. I haven't commented on that before now
because it wasn't bothering me much, but for some reason in this book it
became more noticable. I understand why authors use first-person present
instead of first-person past: it avoids the memoir effect, where the tense
tells the reader that the protagonist survived the story to tell it. But
it's such an artificial story-telling tense, and sometimes, as here, it
makes me feel like the character is describing their actions in a
role-playing game instead of living them. It wasn't a huge problem, but I
found it created some artificial distance that I had to read past.
Second, significant suspension of disbelief is required for parts of this
book. In Mockingjay, given what we see and what we're now aware
of, it's less the overall political structure as some of the details of
what the characters run into. I was somewhat hoping that Collins would
move entirely beyond the basic structure of the Hunger Games for this
book, but she returns to it in an altered form. It works on a
metaphorical level, and results in one of my favorite character moments of
the book, but the way in which she introduces Games-style obstacles is
frankly unbelievable from a practical perspective. There's simply no way
that a city would be constructed or run in that fashion. One just has to
nod and go along with it for the story.
But what a story, and not the story I was expecting at all.
Mockingjay of course follows up on the cliff-hanger from
Catching Fire, although again moves a short distance into the
future. Katniss's life and her perception of and interaction with the
world has been heavily disrupted again. At first, I thought Collins was
setting up a typical climactic story of the primary protagonist coming
into her full powers and saving everything. That expectation, coupled
with the jarring dislocation that ends Catching Fire and starts
this book, left me struggling a bit with the start of this book. But that
struggle and dislocation are part of the story, and part of what Collins
is constructing is a startlingly deep look at the role of heroes, the
meaning of symbols, and the nature of warfare.
This series has, all along, been playing with the intersection of
violence, public admiration, audience, and games, but it's been the
backdrop of stories of personal survival. Mockingjay makes Katniss
more aware of that intersection and hence tackles it more directly while
increasing the stakes. One expects defiance and inspiring rhetoric and
heroic triumph, but while those play a role here, they're only part, and
we also get to see below the surface where those emotions are constructed
and manipulated towards other goals. The tension around that manipulation
is beautiful: a taut balance between real and artificial, between just
causes and disturbing motives, between true agency and being used as
someone else's pawn, between scripted and unscripted moments. This is the
second book I've read in as many months that takes a much deeper and more
nuanced look at the politics of violence and freedom-fighting than the
usual triumphalism and says true things in the process. I like this trend
and hope it continues.
Mockingjay also directly tackles the ethics of violence, another
theme that's been threading through the series to date but which hasn't
been at the forefront of the story the way it is here. Collins builds a
lovely three-way contrast of attitudes towards violence and willingness to
act between three of the characters, and treats each approach with respect
and integrity. This is a hard book, much harder than I would have
initially expected for young adult marking (and hooray for that), because
it doesn't allow easy answers to hard problems. It also directly
undermines the lone hero motif. The protagonists don't get to be in
charge of everything that happens, but instead have to work at finding
ways to be true to themselves within a structure that's always being
imposed by one force or another. This is refreshingly clear-eyed, and
sets up some emotional climaxes that are far more moving than a simpler
treatment would have allowed.
It's also worth noting that violence has consequences in
Mockingjay; the horror of children fighting each other that formed
the backdrop of the first two books is neither forgotten nor discarded
lightly. Collins tries hard, and I think mostly succeeds, at showing from
the inside how that violence might affect someone beyond the immediate and
leave subtle and lingering scars. It's hard to spread those effects over
enough time to show gradual changes and repeated trauma without slowing
the story down too much, but while at times this is a slower book than the
previous two, I think it finds a good balance.
I'm being elliptical in my descriptions because I don't want to spoil any
of the surprises. I guessed the specific details of one climactic action
about halfway through the book, but despite that I was caught entirely by
surprise by the surrounding emotional context and would want other readers
to have the same experience. The ending is hard, painful, and utterly
beautiful, and more true than most of the book endings I've read. It was
not at all the ending that I expected, but I'm convinced that it's the
ending the series needed.
The first two books of this series were good, action-packed stories with a
sharp edge of social commentary and analysis below the surface.
Mockingjay, despite somewhat more glaring flaws and a slow start,
is something more. It's a challenge to the reader: What would you decide?
What side would you take? Would you dare to make the same decisions? Is
Katniss right? Is it worth it? It's risky, and angry, and scarred, and
uncertain, and parts of it hurt like a punch in the gut. I loved it.
Rating: 9 out of 10
2012-05-08: Review: Larque on the Wing
Review: Larque on the Wing, by Nancy Springer
| Publisher |
Avon |
| Copyright |
February 1994 |
| Printing |
February 1995 |
| ISBN |
0-380-76742-2 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
277 |
Larque Harootunian is a wife and mother, taking care of three children and
her occasionally out-of-work husband while painting "home-decoration
products." Which involve a lot of cows. It's not a bad life; indeed, she
thinks it's a rather comfortable, complacent life. Until Skylark shows
up: obnoxious, unbathed, scrawny, insulting, and translucent, a
doppelganger of herself at ten.
Larque has always been able to create doppelgangers of people. Mental
images of others that she thinks about too much tend to become temporarily
real, or at least as real as ghosts. Generally, they float around for a
while and disappear. There have been some intensely embarassing instances
of naked people in the supermarket, but otherwise she and her family have
gotten used to them. At first, she thinks Skylark is just another one of
them, but for some reason Skylark can talk. And gets into her paints and
make a wreck of the canvas she had been saving for something special whose
time never seemed to come. And gets her thinking about her life.
A female mid-life crisis isn't typical literary fare, and certainly isn't
typical fantasy fare. That's one of several things that makes this book
so unusual. Another is its handling of interesting characters against a
backdrop of mundane life, while staying true to both. A lot of wild
things happen to Larque over the course of this book, but they're also
grounded in a sense of day-to-day concerns (like whether her husband will
keep his job and whether she can continue the painting that supports their
family). It's a book about rediscovering balance, and while that involves
some wild see-sawing at times, Larque's re-arrival at that balance is
wonderful to read.
There's a lot about sexuality here. One of Larque's first actions as the
crisis grows is to discover Popular Street, a sort of magical underground
for misfits and cast-outs. There, she meets Shadow and gets a bodily
remake as a gay boy with detachable penis and breasts, which of course
freaks her husband out considerably. That's the sort of event that, laid
out in a review without context, sounds like it could derail the story,
but it's handled beautifully. Springer weaves it into the tapestry of
Larque's separate selves, separate desires, and separate sides of her
personality, many of which she's been sadly neglecting. The story is
surreal, but it's not the sort of surreality that throws the reader out of
the story. It reflects both the chaos and the longings of sides of Larque
that she hasn't thought about or hasn't felt courageous enough to explore.
But the best part of this story is Larque's relationship with her mother.
Her mother has the ability to "blink" people, and sometimes situations.
When things happen that she doesn't like, she blinks and they go away.
Sometimes just for her, but increasingly by changing the other person to
conform to her expectations. It's her mother who makes Skylark's
situation critical (which drives much of the plot of the book), and it's
her mother who brings out another side of Larque: the Virtuous Woman, who
Larque spends much of the book trying to understand how to deal with.
This is an absolutely brilliant concretized metaphor for the effect of
societal and parental expectations on people, and for how the focused
effect of those expectations can make one feel like one is becoming a
different person. Larque on the Wing is full of metaphors made
literal, and like this one, they're usually brilliant and insightful. And
the resolution of Larque's conflict with her mother is both surprising and
completely satisfying, part of an ending that brings together all the
themes of the book in a wonderfully appropriate conclusion.
I also really liked the role of Larque's family in the story. At the
start of the book, her husband seems like a bit of a lump, and not
particularly sympathetic to her problems. But, over the course of the
book, one comes to understand why she loves him, and why he's important,
without ever having him take over the center of the story. By the end of
the book, he became one of my favorite characters even though there are
parts of Larque that he can't really deal with. This is another bit of
balance that's exceptionally well-done. It was also refreshing to have
Larque's children be in the story but not be the center of either it or
her life. This is Larque's story, and there's more to her than being a
mother, although her children are also supportive when she needs it.
Larque on the Wing caught me by surprise. I was a bit dubious
going in, and the initial surreality was off-putting. But the more of it
I read, the more I liked it. There is a bit too much of Larque wandering
around not knowing what to do, but only a bit; she has a lot of bad
assumptions she has to face, and she comes to terms with herself fast
enough that I never got really annoyed with her. The story is humorous,
thoughtful, raunchy, and sarcastic in turns, and taken as a whole is one
of the best portrayals of a mid-life crisis and of coming to terms with
one's family that I've ever read. Recommended.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2012-04-30: Review: Catching Fire
Review: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
| Series |
Hunger Games #2 |
| Publisher |
Scholastic |
| Copyright |
September 2009 |
| ISBN |
0-439-02349-1 |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
391 |
This is the sequel to The Hunger Games
and, despite a somewhat awkward recap woven into the beginning of the
book, is not a sequel that stands alone. I can't imagine trying to read
it without having read the first book of the series.
It's also difficult to review since it builds directly on events of
The Hunger Games, and the nature of the first book makes it hard to
avoid spoilers when discussing any subsequent books. I'll attempt it
regardless, although that may mean being vague. I do have to talk about
one element that I suspect everyone expected, but if you want no spoilers
at all, you may want to skip this review.
Catching Fire opens six months after the conclusion of the Games
and just before the Victory Tour, a tour that the victor in the Games
takes of all of the Districts. Katniss (there's your one spoiler) has
returned to her life in District 12. It's much easier and more luxurious,
but it's still recognizably similar to her previous life. She has no
desire to be pulled out of it into the machinations of the Games and the
Capitol, but she of course doesn't have a choice, nor is the government
through with her or particularly fond of her after the events of the first
book. The next Games loom in another six months, during which Katniss is
expected to be a mentor and to try to keep another year's tributes alive.
The opening of this book is very awkward, lacking some of the polish and
technique that experienced authors bring to the mechanics of building a
sequel. Many authors struggle with inserting the necessary recap of the
previous book, some worse than Collins does here, but the tone and
language also felt a bit forced. Collins continues a first-person mix of
internal monologue and clipped description, and it does work once one gets
into the story, but I thought the start felt a bit forced and staccato.
But this only lasts the first chapter before Collins turns up the
intensity and risk and picks up the arc of danger from the first book in
earnest.
Unfortunately, the first step of turning up that intensity is introducing
a hissable villain. The scene is very dramatic, and emotionally intense
for both Katniss and the reader, but the villain is sadly over-the-top (to
the point of seeming like he was stolen from a supernatural fantasy,
although we do get a barely adequate explanation in the third book). One
of the things I liked best about the first book was the degree to which it
kept villainy structural instead of giving into the temptation to
concentrate it in one person. I found this rather disappointing.
Thankfully, after that, Collins does something interesting structurally.
Catching Fire echos the events of The Hunger Games in many
respects: the timing is different, and some of the early events are, of
course, different, but there are marked parallels. But where before
Katniss went in alone and largely ignorant of both broader context of
what's happening and what being a tribute will mean, here she has her past
experience and a much stronger connection to the larger world.
Catching Fire is largely the story of her slow realization of how
connected she is, of how the rest of the world touches her and she touches
it, competing against her natural instinct to go it alone and be as
self-sufficient as possible. Katniss goes through the first book in
ignorance with the readers learning alongside her; repeating with
experience gives both her and the reader a chance to be more analytical,
to be more deliberate, to try to make specific choices instead of reacting
on instinct and an internal sense of ethics.
And Katniss struggles with that, in part because Collins does something
else noteworthy here. Her evil authoritarian government is not stupid.
The evil remains overdone (the whole blood smell and flowers thing struck
me as more cartoonish than threatening, akin to white-cat stroking), but
one of the questions I had in the first book was why the technology
clearly in evidence in the Games wasn't used by the government more in
day-to-day life. Catching Fire partly answers that question, plus
shows just how difficult it is to resist an authoritarian government in a
bit of realism that's often lacking in this sort of story. That does mean
that both Katniss and the reader are left in a helpless holding pattern at
times, but Collins maintains her excellent sense of pacing and swept me
right through the story. I finished it in two days and three sittings.
I had a few more minor problems with this book: the concentration of
villainy, some places where the language wasn't as polished as it could
have been, and a few places where Collins's descriptions of Katniss's
internal emotional state felt heavy-handed. But the main problem that I
had with it was the ending. To warn, it is a cliffhanger, even more so
than the ending of the first book. But, beyond that, I didn't like the
tone of it at all. This is the sort of story where rooting for Katniss
and being entirely on her side is much of the enjoyment of the book, so
having her seem stupid (and even hysterical) grated on me badly. There's
also a bit too much deus ex machina and way too much loss of
agency. Both of these are realistic to be sure, but I didn't think
sufficient groundwork was laid for the ending to come naturally out of the
story. It left a bad taste in my mouth, particularly since up to that
point I loved the climax of the book.
(I have subsequently read the third book, which redeems the ending to a
great extent. But one doesn't have that experience at the end of the
second book, so I'll comment on that in the later review.)
But, despite the ending and the other flaws, I liked this book. I would
have liked it even more with a slightly different ending, but it's a
worthy sequel. It is the middle book of a trilogy, but Collins avoids
some of the middle-book feel via the repetition with experience structure
and with excellent pacing. Collins expands the scope of the story and
adds complexity without turning the evil government into too much of a
cliche, and she left me eager to start the final book. I recommend it to
anyone who liked The Hunger Games.
Followed by Mockingjay.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2012-04-30: Debian private repositories
Earlier this year, I switched Stanford's internal repositories from an old
debarchiver setup that didn't do repository signing to something more
modern and secure built on top of reprepro.
While we're not doing anything particularly exciting at a technical level,
I thought it might be interesting for people to see how a large site with
heavy Debian usage divides up and manages its internal repositories.
I put up a first draft of a writeup at
Debian private repositories.
This is currently fairly incomplete. One obvious thing that's missing is
a pointer to the wrapper script that we use, but I know there's more. I'm
happy to prioritize additional documentation based on what people would
find interesting. Send me email (or mention on debian-enterprise, to
which I'll also send a pointer to this) if there's anything in particular
you want to hear about.
2012-04-29: Review: Odyssey
Review: Odyssey, by Jack McDevitt
| Series |
Academy #5 |
| Publisher |
Ace |
| Copyright |
November 2006 |
| Printing |
November 2007 |
| ISBN |
0-441-01540-9 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
423 |
Odyssey is the fifth book in the Academy (or Priscilla Hutchins)
series, which started with The Engines of
God, but like many of the books in this series it can be read
independently. One will miss the numerous references to previous events
in the history of space exploration, but none of them are horribly
important for following the plot. That unfortunately also means that it's
not a direct sequel to Omega and doesn't
advance the plot of the Omega clouds, which I found frustrating.
It's becoming harder and harder to maintain funding for deep space
exploration as humanity turns inward to deal with serious environmental
problems at home. The Academy is short on ships and funds for routine
maintenance, and an increasing amount of space travel is tourism instead.
But that might change when a group of spheres, maneuvering in formation,
are spotted outside a tourist ship. There had been scattered reports of
so-called "moonriders" before (the future version of UFOs), but now the
sightings start coming fast and frequent. And then become ominous, as
they apparently redirect an asteroid into a collision course with a virgin
world with unicellular life.
Odyssey is partly a puzzle, and features a few of the tense rescue
scenes from previous books in the series, but it's mostly a book about
personalities and politics, about character interactions and debates
during the investigation of what the moonriders are and what to do about
them. Hutchins continues to be Director of Operations for the Academy and
doesn't go into space. Those who do go into space and do most of the
on-the-scene investigation are an odd (and political) mix, one of whom is
the egotistical and contrarian editor Gregory MacAllister who played a
prominant role in Deepsix. This is both
a feature and a bug: any story benefits from an irascible cynic, but I
find MacAllister wears on me at length. He works better for me in small
doses rather than as a primary character.
McDevitt continues to write stories with a different pacing and different
focus than any other space-focused SF that I've read. Most of the Academy
missions, and one of the centerpieces of this plot, are science missions
of various kinds, and the politics are a mix of academic and government
politics of the sort that one gets near the top of government-funded basic
science entities. The poster child for SF about scientists doing science
is Gregory Benford's Timescape, which I
didn't care for. I understand the appeal much better in the hands of
McDevitt. It's a refreshing breath of air to have science be uncertain
and slow, to have characters behave with both personal and institutional
caution instead of rushing into the plot, and to have a story full of
false starts and abandoned theories like actual science. It makes for
slow pacing and a far stronger focus on personalities, but if you've read
much of McDevitt, you already know whether you enjoy that or not.
The one caveat that I'll add is that, despite some well-handled twists and
a truly excellent set piece, I found the ending rather disappointing. I
came away from the book with a feeling of station-keeping, of little or no
real progress in understanding the universe and without any dramatic
changes to the situation in which the book started. There seemed to be
less plot and less substance to this book than in the previous books of
the series, despite being of the same length. I know this isn't a
universal problem — my mother liked this book just fine
— but I wanted a bit more revelation at the end than we get.
This is becoming an ongoing problem with this series, and I suspect I'm
looking for a different story than the one McDevitt wants to tell.
I think this is one of the weaker books in the Academy series, but
opinions will differ depending on how much you like the characters. (If,
for example, you like MacAllister more than I do, you'll probably enjoy it
more.) If you've been enjoying the series, this is more of the same and
therefore probably worth reading. But don't expect it to be as good as
Chindi, which is still the high point.
Followed by Cauldron.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2012-04-28: Review: The Hunger Games
Review: The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
| Series |
Hunger Games #1 |
| Publisher |
Scholastic |
| Copyright |
2008 |
| Printing |
September 2009 |
| ISBN |
0-439-02352-1 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
374 |
Katniss lives in District 12 of a post-collapse United States ruled with
an iron fist from the Capitol District. District 12 is in the
Appalachias, a mining district, and one of the poorest, not that life
anywhere outside of the Capitol is very good. Katniss's father died in a
mine explosion, and ever since she's been taking care of her younger
sister and depressive mother in every way she can, primarily through
illegal hunting in the nearby forest.
The central fact of life in the districts, ever since a failed uprising
and the annihilation of District 13, is the Hunger Games. Annually, every
district is forced to select two children between 12 and 18 by lot. The
lottery system for selecting tributes is complex and the chance of
selection grows with age and with additional risks that the children can
take to get extra provisions for their family. Katniss has been taking
those risks for years. All 24 selected go to the capitol for a brief
period of training, and then are thrown into the wilderness (turned into
an arena by technology) to fight to the death. The one winner is set for
life, showered with (relative) riches, and with the responsibility of
training subsequent "tributes" from that district.
Katniss's chances of being selected, due to the additional rations she's
gambled for, are better than she'd like. Those of her hunting partner are
even stronger. But she is not at all prepared for the lot to fall on her
baby sister, just turned twelve, whose chances should have been miniscule,
and finds herself volunteering in her sister's place.
It probably must be said up-front that the premise of the Hunger Games is
not particularly believable. A system this cruel seems moderately
implausible even for the combination of tyrrany and coliseum-style
entertainment. And there are a few other problems that niggle at one's
suspension of disbelief, such as the unrealistically low population of at
least District 12 given its place as part of the industrial base
supporting what we later see is a fairly lavish civilization. But within
a few pages of starting the book, it becomes clear why it's as popular as
it is. Collins tells the story from Katniss's perspective, with a sparse,
efficient, and effective style that conveys both Katniss's emotional
reactions and the emotional distance that lets her be the person she has
to be. The story is engrossing and fast-paced and the first-person
narration is utterly sympathetic. One is quickly so immersed in Katniss's
world that the implausibilities stop mattering.
It's also a book full of events that, while unrealistic from a strict
realism perspective, are sharp and stinging as metaphor. The more I
noticed the underlying layer of commentary on high school, on bullying and
popularity and teenage alliances, on entertainment, on reality shows, and
on the abandonment of children to hostile environments by adults, the less
the required suspension of disbelief mattered.
One of the things The Hunger Games is decidedly not, despite
frequent comparisons, is Lord of the Flies. This is not even
remotely the story of the inherent brutality in human beings taken outside
the boundaries of civilized society. Rather, it's the story of desperate
teenagers put into a vicious and deadly situation through overwhelming
authority and trying to cope with that situation as best they can. Much
of the pleasure and satisfaction of the story comes from Katniss
struggling to balance ethics and survival and finding ways to stay true to
herself. Other tributes are trying to do the same but finding different
paths; others still thrive on their sense of superiority and certainty
that they'll win. (That is where I thought the parallels to bullying were
strongest.)
Another thing this book is not is just the description of tactical combat
between a bunch of kids. There are some tactics here, of course, and they
provide their share of the tension, but the ethical struggle is as central
as the physical struggle. Collins does a great job conveying the
addictive nature of a reality show, where the alliances, negotiations, and
psychological strategies are as much or more interesting than the physical
challenges. The game masters are constantly meddling to heighten the
tension and provide more emotional drama for the audience, and the
alliances are both completely real and completely fake simultaneously.
Collins gets the feel dead-on; the Games read exactly like a reality show
with viciously high stakes and non-consenting participants.
Also, a substantial amount of the book takes place before (and some after)
the Games themselves, including Katniss's backstory and prior relationship
with the boy tribute from her district, and those parts of the story are
not trivial or simply setup. It's clear that the real story in this
universe is going to go far beyond the Games.
I doubt many readers will find the plot arc surprising. Katniss comes
from the poorest district, one that has only won twice in the nearly
hundred-year history of the games, and is obviously an underdog. She
discovers valuable talent for the Games despite not having trained like
some of the other kids, following the standard model for this sort of
story. There is, of course, a romance, even a bit of a romantic triangle.
The path to the ending has some surprises, but the nature of it is fairly
predictable. But it's all told so well, and with such a great eye for the
emotional arcs of Katniss, the other competitors, and the audience view
that the familiar story structure doesn't detract. Instead, it serves as
the skeleton for some great story-telling. The constant guesswork at how
the audience is reacting to the story is particularly well-handled and
adds some welcome complexity.
The Hunger Games also deserves its reputation for a strong female
protagonist. Collins does a beautiful job avoiding belaboring that point
and instead subtlely weaving it through the story. Katniss has done what
she has to do because there's no one else, and that just happens to lead
to a wonderful inversion of gender roles between her and Peeta, the other
tribute from District 12. Only when they're forced to put on traditional
gender roles for the cameras does the contrast with their normal
personalities become obvious. The subversion of the usual boy-girl
storyline is delightful in its understated simplicity.
And, beyond that, every character here felt real to me, even the kids who
were little more than cannon fodder or the adults who keep the system in
operation. Collins characterizes with an emotion here, a bit of sympathy
or empathy there, and even with characters that appear for only moments in
the book, one can imagine a background and a motivation. It's a beautiful
construction of an oppressive system: there's no single hissable villain,
and a lot of people who want to be on Katniss's side in one way or
another, but a relentless momentum to the structure of the Games and a
lurking evil created by their existence that sucks the characters in
whether they want it or not. This is a wonderful example of how to create
morality and opposition in a story without stereotyped villains.
I wasn't sure what to think about this book going in, but I came away very
impressed. It is violent, in places a bit too violent for my taste, and
some parts of the world structure don't withstand serious inspection, but
it's not gratuitous and it has an excellent narrative voice. I loved the
characterization and the note-perfect emotional resonance with the
unthinking cruelty of audience reaction to drama. Highly recommended; I
will definitely be reading the remaining two books in the trilogy.
Followed by Catching Fire.
Rating: 8 out of 10
2012-04-27: Review: The Affluent Society
Review: The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith
| Publisher |
Houghton Mifflin |
| Copyright |
1958, 1969, 1976, 1998 |
| Printing |
1998 |
| ISBN |
0-395-92500-2 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
291 |
This is a difficult book to review, particularly after a single reading,
because it's so well-argued and so dense with ideas, and so methodically
constructive in its presentation, that it's hard to either record all of
its key points or to put it into appropriate context. That's also why
it's an important book to read. Like Jane
Jacobs, it's an iconoclastic challenge to the status quo, a call to arms
that argues that the basis of our economic thought and planning has gone
badly astray. Unlike Jacobs's writing on economics, as opposed to urban
planning, it's gone on to be very influential in the economic beliefs of
political liberalism.
Galbraith's agenda here is to argue that much of conventional economics is
based on assumptions and beliefs about the average wealth of the humanity
that were formed in the infancy of economics in the 18th century,
assumptions that have become obsolete. He starts by defining
"conventional wisdom" (this is the work that coined that term and made it
a common phrase) in an analysis that matches the feelings of persecution
of iconoclasts everywhere, but which carries a lot of truth regardless.
More recent writing on the same topic usually approaches from the angle of
cognitive bias: problems of induction, confirmation bias, and similar
ideas. Galbraith doesn't use those terms, but he presents a similar
picture of the momentum of entrenched ideas and the difficulty of
reconsidering accepted wisdom, one that closely matches Paul Krugman's
recent exasperation at economists or the frustration felt by nearly anyone
who watches the major US news media.
The point of this discussion in the context of The Affluent Society
is, of course, to attack the conventional wisdom in economics, but
Galbraith starts out by sketching his picture of what that conventional
wisdom looks like. A key part of his thesis is that economics came of age
in a world where nearly everyone was desperately poor, where eliminating
poverty was basically unthinkable, and where providing some opportunity
for people to become less poor was the highest calling of economics. But
early economists believed in iron laws of economics that would always keep
workers poor. Even when that weakened in the late 18th century, it didn't
lose its grip on economic thought. Although the wages of workers weren't
as remorselessly reduced to survival levels, they still weren't thought
capable of rising far.
This also, according to Galbraith, suited the conventional wisdom of
Marxists, the other major school of thought in 18th-century economics.
Marxists believed that the fall of capitalism was inevitable, and would be
brought about by worker revolt against that capping of their wages,
against the economic forces that kept those wages at a subsistence level
while the property owners captured the profits. Both conventional liberal
(in the Adam Smith sense, as opposed to mercantile) economics and Marxism
therefore formed an alliance of sorts in support of the conventional
wisdom: the wages of workers across the economy would always be poor
relative to the property owners under capitalism. This suited the
Marxists, who saw Marxism and class revolution as the answer; the liberals
instead took refuge in increasing productivity. Productivity gains seemed
to be the perfect solution: not only did increased worker productivity
prove quite effective at making everyone better off, it avoided the highly
controversial issue of redistribution of wealth (and thereby the taint of
Marxism).
On top of this foundation, Galbraith builds a model of an economic system
that has pursued a useful metric past the point of revolutionary change
and continues to pursue it for reasons that are partly obsolete. The
problem of 18th-century economics was how to produce enough basic food,
clothing, and shelter for the population to prevent people from dying of
starvation and exposure. To that end, every increase in productivity
contributed directly to alleviating human misery by producing more basic
stuff of life. It also provided a chance of social mobility; economists
thought that workers would generally always be poor, but exceptional
workers who were far more productive than average could demand a higher
wage, or earn more through product they sold, and thereby join the
property-holding class. And none of this was wrong; for the time, it was
a reasonable theory.
But the economy has long since passed the point where the marginal labor
of an additional worker is used primarily to create more basic economic
goods like food. Marginal labor is now producing items much higher up
Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Useful and desired items, to be sure, but
not things that are required for lives and health of the population. And,
when that transition happened, a change in the way we think about
employment also happened. Previously, everyone had to be employed because
that was the only way to grow enough food to feed everyone; now, everyone
has to be employed because the job is how they are paid to feed
themselves, but the entire population is fed, clothed, and housed by a
small fraction of the work in that society. The relationship between
their work output and the subsistence of the community has changed
considerably.
Put another way, Galbraith argues that "he who does not work shall not
eat" made sense as a macroeconomic policy in the 18th century, but no
longer makes any macroeconomic sense. He further argues that the pursuit
of that policy, and the overriding importance of full employment for
individual economic stability in the current economy, leads to attempting
to run the economy continuously at maximum capacity to provide as many
jobs as possible. This, he argues, makes it more fragile and therefore
makes economic downturns both inevitable and more severe.
It's easy to follow this logic into a black-and-white attack on
consumerism, such as an argument that the products of the economy
shouldn't be produced. Galbraith avoids that with a much more nuanced
discussion. It's not that the many products of the current economy are
not valuable, but rather that they may not be urgent. They aren't basic
necessities; they're optional, and therefore the choice between those
goods and other human desires is subject to individual preference. In
particular, he argues that if we were not attempting to generate jobs for
full employment and instead taking a step back and evaluating other
possible tradeoffs and alternatives, it may make more macroeconomic sense
to value leisure or to strike a different balance between private
enterprise and public goods. But the private creation and consumption of
goods that can be marketed and advertised for individual sale has, in
effect, run away with the broader economy, creating a self-perpetuating
engine of job creation, demand, and consumption that's out of balance with
the goals and desires of individuals.
Now, Galbraith makes the macroeconomic argument and then stops; he does
not go on to address other reasons why people commonly believe everyone
should have a job (free rider problems, moral beliefs, and so forth). His
prescriptions for putting more slack and flexibility into the economy and
supporting everyone at a minimum standard of living are therefore not
going to be universally persuasive. But even if one believes in the
virtues of hard work in a capitalist system for non-macroeconomic reasons,
Galbraith develops other angles of this argument that I think would be of
broad interest.
For one, he argues persuasively that the effect of advertising, marketing,
and a focus on individual products for sale has created a systemic
imbalance between public and private goods. We have more automobiles than
roads, more homes than schools, more evening destinations than street
lights, because our economic system undervalues public goods.
Corporations have billions of dollars to pour into creating demand for
private goods, but there is no corresonding marketing of public goods. If
advertising is worth those dollars poured into it, this of necessity means
there is an artificial imbalance of demand. Making the imbalance worse,
individual consumers cannot easily vote with their spending in favor of
more public goods, since the public goods are not available for sale (and
hence individual choice) and can only be funded collectively.
This argument should be very familiar to libertarians, who often agree
with Galbraith's analysis but propose a different solution: mechanisms to
turn more public goods into marketable products so that they can be
incorporated into the economic system. Galbraith doesn't engage with this
argument beyond asserting this is not, in general, possible. He instead
discusses political policies that could rebalance public and private
spending, such as tax schemes that scale by economic growth (including an
interesting defense of the sales tax).
I've still barely outlined the main thrust of Galbraith's argument, and
have left a great deal out, including a compelling analysis of the role of
economic security in the economy (precis: each economic player pursues it
for themselves while arguing the virtues of creative destruction for
everyone else) and an analysis of the politics of wealth inequality.
Galbraith does a wonderful job of anticipating and addressing objections,
particularly once he gets through his economic history and introduction.
This is the sort of book where I kept saying "but" only to find my
objection addressed in the next chapter.
Paul Krugman, with whom I normally tend to agree on economic issues, is
famously derisive of Galbraith and his economic theories, and now I want
to read Krugman's Peddling Prosperity to understand the argument
better. However, based on what I've seen of his objections, I think
Galbraith may be arguing at a different level than Krugman's objections.
The Affluent Society is not really a book about economics.
Although Galbraith occasionally touches on some related issues, it's not
truly about Keynsian stimulous, the balance between inflation and full
employment, IS-LM models, or similar economic details. Rather, Galbraith
is tackling a different question: what are our individual and collective
goals, what do we want from an economy, and is the economy serving those
goals? Are individuals in the economy actually empowered to use their
time and resources in pursuit of their personal priorities, rather than
artificial priorities created by the economy? It is, in short, more about
politics than about economics, and a defense of productivity growth and
its corresponding impact on the general standard of living as measured by
the tools of conventional economics rather misses the point.
This is a fascinating book about which I could have written even more, but
I'll stop here and just recommend that everyone read it. Even if you
don't agree with Galbraith's position on the role of government in
macroeconomics, there are substantial insights here into the way we make
economic decisions between goals of different priorities and urgencies,
and into the decisions that we make by default. It's made me think hard
about the tradeoffs between public and private goods, and between having
more and working less (or less hard, another fascinating chapter that I
didn't discuss). Highly recommended.
Rating: 9 out of 10
2012-04-26: Hugo nominee haul
I'm finally home again for a while after a lot of travel that was
unexpectedly extended. It's so very nice to be home and to have a chance
to settle in and not go anywhere for at least a month.
It's also rather nice to come home to toys, which in this case means more
books. The
Hugo
nominees were announced while I was gone, which of course meant a book
order. And I've been picking up a few other things along the way.
Daniel Abraham — The Dragon's Path (sff)
C.L. Anderson — Bitter Angels (sff)
Elizabeth Bear — Range of Ghosts (sff)
Suzanne Collins — Catching Fire (sff)
Suzanne Collins — Mockingjay (sff)
James S.A. Corey — Leviathan Wakes (sff)
Lev Grossman — The Magicians (sff)
Alisa Harris — Raised Right (non-fiction)
Michael Flynn — The January Dancer (sff)
N.K. Jemisin — The Broken Kingdoms (sff)
N.K. Jemisin — The Kingdom of Gods (sff)
Paul Lafargue — The Right to be Lazy (non-fiction)
Marc Levison — The Box (non-fiction)
George R.R. Martin — A Dance with Dragons (sff)
Jack McDevitt — Echo (sff)
China Miéville — Embassytown (sff)
Mark Monmonier — Air Apparent (non-fiction)
Bill Moyers — Bill Moyers Journal (non-fiction)
Mary Norton — The Borrowers (children)
Mary Norton — The Borrowers Afield (children)
Mary Norton — The Borrowers Afloat (children)
Mary Norton — The Borrowers Aloft (children)
Mary Norton — The Borrowers Avenged (children)
Hannu Rajaniemi — The Quantum Thief (sff)
It's Hugo reading season, which means priority goes to the Corey, the
Miéville, and the Martin, which are nominees. I've already read
Leviathan Wakes and just need to write the review. I'm currently
reading Deadline by Mira Grant, which I bought a while back (and
which is also a nominee).
I'm still trying to decide, for A Dance with Dragons, whether to go
back and re-read the previous four books in the series. It will make a
lot more sense if I do, but that's a lot of reading. I'll read the other
nominees and then see how inspired I feel.
So much great stuff to read. This order was particularly rich with it.
I'm getting back into reading regularly, which is making me very happy,
but also means I need to carve out more time to read. I'm six reviews
behind again!
And, of course, being home means that video games are an option again, to
cut into my reading time. So many fun things to do!
2012-04-26: rra-c-util 4.3
The major change in this release is a reworking of the GSS-API configure
probes. They now check for headers with file existence checks if told to
use a specific install root or include path, since otherwise configure
could incorrectly detect properties of the system GSS-API include files
instead of the ones it was told to use. While I was at it, I also moved a
bunch of the standard GSS-API checks into the Autoconf macro instead of
requiring they be done separately in configure.ac, and I added a new
RRA_INCLUDES_GSSAPI macro to make it easier to write checks.
Following a recommendation in
Effective Java
(which applied equally well to other programming languages), I modified
buffer_sprintf and buffer_vsprintf to no longer take a boolean argument
saying whether to append the information, and instead added two new
functions. The meaning of boolean arguments is often very opaque at the
call site.
There's also another fix for RRA_LIB_REMCTL_OPTIONAL (setting a shell
variable that it was documented to set), and the PAM test script parser
now supports parameter expansion in the PAM arguments.
You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2012-04-25: C TAP Harness 1.11
Since I synchronized the latest WebAuth release with this, I should
actually release it, although there may be some follow-on changes and
another release from some other things in progress.
The biggest change in this release is that I redid the source organization
so that everything is under tests, and I redid the includes in the TAP
library so that they assume they're under tests/tap and not just a
directory named tap.
I have mixed feelings about this, since it forces a particular code layout
on users of the library unless they patch the TAP library. However, I
wanted to introduce a macros.h header that was used by other TAP headers,
and if I stayed with having the TAP library reference headers under a tap
directory and then users add a -I flag to find the headers, every test
program that used the library would have to have a -I flag to pick up the
nested includes. With non-recursive Automake, that's horribly painful
unless you build the entire project with a -I flag pointing to the TAP
directory (which also seems wrong). The only other alternative was to use
#include "", but I find that very fragile.
Also in this release are various portability fixes. Feature-test macros
were an interesting experiment, but they make everything difficult on
Solaris, so now feature-test macros are only used if specifically
requested or when built with gcc -ansi (or similar flags). I also
avoided using local in the TAP shell library (not supported by Solaris) in
favor of regular global variables with a tap_ prefix. Finally, the
is_double function and all the floating point code is now in separate
files that can be copied in as desired, avoiding the need to link with -lm
on Solaris systems if is_double is not used anywhere in the test suite.
You can get the latest version from the
C TAP Harness distribution page.
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