What are we reading these months?

#1 read After the Golden Age.  This is very good.  DH says it’s really an anti-super-hero book… exactly the opposite formula.  I liked it immensely.  (Did not much care for Discord’s Apple, however.  It was dull and I just don’t care for dystopias all that much.)

May Contain Traces of Magic: #2 wants to know whether it’s good!  Um… I think it was ok.  Obviously not memorable!  Tom Holt’s earlier works are his best.  I didn’t send it on, so it must be worth rereading.

The Quality of Mercy by Faye Kellerman:

Enh. The book was ok, but too long. Get it from the library only. If you want to read about someone inspiring Shakespeare, read King of Shadows by Susan Cooper instead.

In other notes, did you know that a lot of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are extremely similar to each other?  If you’ve got a “best of” collection, that’s probably all you need.  How many interminable stories about men flying a hot-air balloon to the moon do you want to get through?  And boy these are sure sausage-fests.  The stories and poems you’ve heard of still hold up, of course (The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado), though “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is hampered by my total lack of belief that (SPOILERS!) an orangutan actually acts that way.  It’s a somewhat uninformed fantasy as far as animal behavior.

Anyway, I’ll keep the Poe volume but my local library / Goodwill is going to get a donation of books pretty soon.

I finished The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross, and I continue to love all three of the series by him I am reading (the Laundry Files, the Family Business, and the Halting State series).  I eagerly await sequels.

Also I am apparently the last fantasy reader in the world to read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemison, but it was definitely worth it.  Read it, if you haven’t. Powerful and interesting. I am eager to read the next one! (#1 had not heard of it and has added it to her wishlist.)

Also I read The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb.

This book is amazing and powerful and like woah.  However, it is also insanely depressing.  Every bad thing the in the world happens to the protagonist.  Pretty much the only awful thing that doesn’t happen is millions of snakes fall from the sky and they scratch your cornea WITH POISON.

Goblin Quest, by Jim C. Hines, OTOH, was pretty cool in a not depressing way, and although bad things happen to the protagonist, they cause him to grow as a goblin.  Quite good for something that’s essentially a D&D dungeon crawl from the perspective of a kidnapped goblin.  I’m ordering the set of 3 books in one after having checked out the first from the library.  (DC has been looking at the library paperback cover longingly, and says ze wants it to be around when ze is old enough to read it.)

I was really disappointed with Monster by A Lee Martinez.  It’s the first of his books I haven’t liked, the first one without likeable characters, and the first one that seemed like a mix of books he’d previously written.  In this case, it was like a mix of  and minus anybody we could possibly care about. This from an author who gets us to love kobalds in the wonderful .

Memo to self:  Alan Dean Foster’s books are Just.  Not.  Good.  I don’t know why I keep trying to read them.  Stop!  They range from terrible to not-my-taste.  Every one I read is not enjoyable.  Don’t be fooled by the cover blurb, Self, you will not like them.  (#1 Disagrees!  She is fond of the Pip and Flinx series and enjoyed a few of his funny early works, particularly the one about the aliens who look like giant rabbits.  Also she thinks there was one about cats being in charge of the universe but doesn’t remember it exactly.)

You guys been reading anything interesting out there in grumpyland?

Favorite authors to read and reread

Diana Wynne Jones

Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Terry Pratchett

LM Montgomery

Georgette Heyer

Mercedes Lackey (ok, schlocky, but hits the spot sometimes)  [#2 not a big Lackey fan]

Dorothy L. Sayers

Charlotte Bronte

Jane Austen

Anne Lamott

Dave Barry (“I wouldn’ta married her if she wasn’t a breather!”)

So, grumpeteers, who are yours?  Who do you reread when you need emotion regulation?  I actually just re-read Sex and the Single Girl because it is silly.  Sometimes I re-read John Scalzi’s books about writing.

Motherhood Online: A book review

We  were sent Motherhood Online by the editor, Michelle Moravec.

This book is a scholarly academic tome, but even given that, there are only two articles in it that I would call inaccessible to non-academic readers.  (And those two articles are both short and probably inaccessible to most academic readers as well.)  Non-academic readers will find the first section just as amusing and the second and third sections just as interesting as this academic reader.

The book starts out with case studies that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been on a pregnancy or mothering forum.  It does seem that if you’ve been on one of these forums, you’ve really been on all of the forums, for all the differences we perceive between the mothering.coms and the babycenters of the world, the dynamics are not that much different, even across forums from different countries.  Oddly, this section is titled “Theoretical perspectives” but is, for the most part, a-theoretical and, for the most part, focuses on each author’s own experiences with an online parenting community.

The second section… titled, “Case studies” includes articles with a broader theory base, more formal qualitative methods, and comparisons across different cases.  This second section focuses on communities that many of us have had less experience with, but are interesting in their own rights.  I especially enjoyed the studies of teenage mothers, autistic parents, port-wine stain, stay-at-home dads, and really most of the articles in this section.  I felt like I learned something reading many of these articles.

The last section focuses on blogs and community, with the stand-out piece being one on the community of people from developed countries who use (employ?) Indian women as surrogate mothers.

Although the introduction focuses on the positives to these online communities, the articles themselves are even-handed with both the positives (community building, information sharing, support) and the negatives (conflict, incorrect information, rationalization, etc.)  The authors come from a number of different disciplines, including communication, sociology, public health, anthropology, history and others.  These different disciplinary paths and perspectives come across in the methodology and writing.  Obviously we feel more comfortable with the social scientist methodologies, but other disciplines provide for entertaining reading and discussion.

Is this worth reading?  Sure!  Especially if you’re into non-fiction and would like to think a bit about they dynamics of online communities.  The book includes a nice collection of articles that, should, for the most part, be as easy to read as a Malcolm Gladwell book, but with perhaps a few more citations included.

What are we reading now?

Agent to the Stars by Scalzi:  Hilarious.  Very much like other Fantasy/SF books about the Hollywood movie industry (Bride of the Rat God, The Revenge of Kali-Ra), and every bit as enjoyable.  (Though with aliens instead of ancient curses.)  I didn’t particularly want the plane ride I started it on to end, or the book for that matter.

Con and Conjure by Lisa Shearin:  Meh.  Another marking time book.  I liked the way there was actually some closure in the previous book.

Psych:  Mind Altering Murder by William Rabkin:  It was ok.

The Wide Awake Princess:  Lots of fun!

Kitty’s Greatest Hits.  A bunch of short stories about Kitty, other people in her books, and historical vampire/werewolf fiction.  The ones with kitty are the best… the historical ones aren’t as much fun.

Once Dead, Twice Shy by Kim Harrison.  Definitely YA, an easy read and a clever concept.  Plays around with fate vs. free will rather than good vs. evil, which is a nice twist on the grim reaper genre (or shinigami genre…).

Template by Matthew Hughes.  No Henghis Hapthorne in this one, but the main character, a professional fencing duelist, is also interesting.  We revisit many of the cultures we’d already discovered in Fools Errant and the Henghis Hapthorne books.  There’s an underlying anthropology message in this one– what is culture, what are mores, how do we experience the world based on our culture?

The travelin’ one of us has been reading a bunch of Heyer: a re-read of Lady of Quality, plus Faro’s Daughter.

The Mongoliad:  awesome idea.  A book written by committee, and unfortunately it shows.  But still you should maybe read it. It’s like an RPG video game but in a good way. Some info-dumping about swordsmanship, which fortunately is authentic as Neal Stephenson is authentically a real historical sword guy. The book is dedicated to Guy Windsor, one of the most well-known experts in the field and an amazing font of knowledge.

Mongoliad #01: The Mongoliad, Book One
by Neal Stephenson

Divine Misfortune by A. Lee Martinez:  light enough to read on choppy plane or when jetlagged in foreign hotel room at 4am.

Discount Armageddon:  I’ve read a bunch of this author’s other stuff but I enjoy this one most so far.  Very silly.  Solid start to a new urban fantasy series.

Cancer Vixen:  rapidly becoming a classic in the field, and I can see why.  Read it.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction:  Hells yes.

Plus a WHOLE BUNCH of other books!  Yay, summer!

Any summer recommendations for us?

Must Dos with the next generation

DH recently had an interesting conversation with his relatives.

He says, and I paraphrase:

Hey, I was just wondering what you thought about “must-play” games…meaning games I really have to play with DC, or really anything I “have to” help DC experience?

I’m planning on playing role-playing games with hir…probably starting when ze’s ~7.  The Descent boardgame seems pretty obvious.  DW has nixed Magic: the Gathering.  I’m sure we’ll play some miniatures game like Warmachine or Hordes.

I can’t think of any other game ze “needs” to play except maybe Magic Realm and Star Fleet Battles.  See, except for really old games, I think things are just getting better.  This goes for video games too…I’ll probably try to break out some Wizardry (Werdna) sometime, and maybe Nethack…but there’s no reason to go back and play Super Mario Bros I don’t think.

I’m sure I’ll show hir the Firefly tv show when ze’s old enough.  We’ve already started watching Dr Who together.

I don’t have any must-read books until ze’s probably 10+…even then I prefer just reading a lot to anything specific.

What do you guys think?

Is there anything you think kids today should experience that you liked as a kid/teenager…or that you wished you’d done when you had time back then?

(Disclaimer:  Yes, I married a nerd… but if you looked at my “must do with kid” list you would realize he is actually the less nerdy of the two of us!  I’m all about the math and the books.)

All the Money in the World: A Book Review

We got a free copy of All the Money in the World by Laura Vandekam for review purposes.

Here is the review!

Summary

All the Money in the World makes the case that many of us could be optimizing our happiness better by changing how we deal with our money and our time.  We can make more money.  We can spend money on different things.  We can keep perspective on what we have, what we want and so on.

Like Warren’s All Your Worth, Vanderkam advocates getting spending right on the big things, not Bach’s latte factor.  Lattes, she argues, bring more happiness than extra square feet in housing (or, in most cases, expensive jewelry).  She’s also a proponent of making more money and using that money to buy time… she mentions the frugality alternative, but mainly gives it lip service.  (Personally, I like the idea of maximizing the gap between earning and spending!)  Another main tenet of the book is the suggestion to figure out what makes you happy and spend money and time on that *now* rather than “tomorrow” (but with balance).

There’s a great section on retirement that focuses on the new face of retirement age and looks on work in older age as an opportunity for personal growth doing something different.  However, I don’t think it emphasizes enough the subset of retiree age folks who will be unable to work or even volunteer for health and other reasons (discrimination, skills obsolescence, etc.)– that’s a real worry that many of us will be unable to anticipate but should plan for, just in case.

The investment sections focus mainly on giving and peer-to-peer kinds of investing.  Basically they’re what I would consider hobby investing, making this investing into a consumption good like when people say they play the lottery for the entertainment value and not because they think they’re actually making a wise money decision.  This kind of investing would be on top of what you’re doing for your retirement funds and would fit into your charitable/social work mental account rather than your money making strategies.

Her weekly book-club has also been fun to read through.

Awesome parts

The book is a very easy read.

She understands economics conceptually and explains it well.  I like that.  Hopefully people reading the book come out with a deep understanding of what opportunity costs are.  In addition, I like the research base.  It was also fun seeing people I know quoted.

Life changing?

Probably not.  A personal finance guru manual for how to live your life– no, she clearly does not have that intention.  Entertaining, definitely.

Will it be useful to you?  Well, I think if you’re a bright type-A kind of person who just hasn’t thought about these issues, it could really open your eyes to the possibilities out there.

Was it useful for me?

Well, no.  I already feel like I’m optimizing my time and money given the constraints I have.  Sure I could work harder on bringing side income, but… then I would have less time, and time is really what I would want to buy.  At the other end, I could spend more on things that give me time, but we’ve done that in the past and right now it isn’t worth it– especially the extra time and hassle it takes to find someone competent who isn’t going to charge you something different from you agreed on and won’t mow over the new blueberry plants.  (Besides, I love the muscles my partner gets from the push mower in the summer.  Mmmmm.  Who needs to spend time at the gym?)

Random side notes

She pokes a bit of fun at the minimalist and homesteading movements.  Not really sure what she has against home-grown tomatoes.  As a symbol of a time-waster you can spend money to get they seem pretty weak– tomatoes are pretty easy to grow (even I can’t kill them) and they’re SO much better than what you can get in stores.  Not everybody has access to local organic heirloom tomatoes at a farmer’s market or Whole Foods!  I would have picked something more difficult to grow or easier to get a good quality version of at the supermarket (maybe cucumbers?).

Her story about ziploc baggies resonates with me.  I’m guessing we had similar upbringings followed by a similar path into upper-middle-class-hood.  (And, based on what I remember on her blog, we mostly did, including our high school experiences.)

She *almost* has a great soundbite explaining why there isn’t a fixed number of jobs in the economy.  That’s my biggest stumbling block with reporters, trying to explain why, without drawing graphs, someone taking a job doesn’t mean someone else loses a job.  I’m still not there yet.  I think she understands it conceptually and man, I wish she could boil it down to a soundbite I could steal.

Bottom Line

If you don’t feel like you’re already perfect, if you feel like you’re drowning in money problems or in time issues, then she’s probably got something to say to you.  And the message goes down pretty easy.  Get more money, buy more time.  Worth a read.

Freelancing: Thoughts on Scalzi’s “You’re not fooling anyone

when you take your laptop into the coffeeshop.”

Now available for Kindle!  Or, you know, by clicking the “writing” tag on his blog.  Something like that.  Basically it’s a collection of his posts on writing up to 2006.  An entertaining read of short essays that are also blog posts.

What I got out of reading this book is that I could totally become a free-lance writer.  I have the skill-set.  I could go through the build-up process.  I can handle frequent rejection (after all, I am an academic).  I have no problem with thinking my writing is precious and uneditable.  I even have a few contacts I could tap.

But… I really don’t want to.  I just don’t think the amount of effort is worthwhile for me right now.  I just like my current job more.

I do do some free-lance writing, but only when it falls into my lap and is related to my research area.  Right now my time is too precious to seek out additional opportunities or to build up my portfolio for less than what I make now with my infrequent policy briefs and news articles and etc.  (Though, I did have to chuckle when Scalzi said that the NYTimes gets away with having people like me write for them for free in exchange for the prestige… because the NYTimes has done exactly that with me!  On an incredibly short deadline too.  Laura Vanderkam would not be impressed.  But hey, my department liked me having the byline.)

And I could be more like Betsy Stevenson (who is one of my personal heroes) and be a public academic for my area of research expertise, but I fear that would require having twitter and there’s other stuff I’d rather do with my time.

So I dunno, maybe if I go through a career crisis and we move to the SF bay area… but not any time soon.

p.s.  We were an editor’s pick in this week’s carnival of personal finance!

Have you ever thought about doing a second job but decided it wasn’t worth the time and effort?

What are we reading?

Timeless by Gail Carriger:  Good reading!  Stuff gets real in this book.  We’re sad this 5-book series is over, but eagerly await the next two series.

Sylvester, or, The Wicked Uncle: by Georgette Heyer. An amusing premise for a romance!

Chasing The Moon by A Lee Martinez: light and fun and very silly.

Knave in Hand, by Laurence Janifer: I don’t know where we got this, but I enjoyed it. Maybe there’s a sequel, somewhere around, like 30 years ago?

The Mostly True Story of Jack:  This is a new author to watch out for.  Her writing style is reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones or Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

Nurture Shock:  Not bad.  It’s more Malcolm Gladwell than the kind of (non-work) non-fiction I usually read (which hasn’t been much recently).  Very easy to digest, not much depth though.

Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children
by Po Bronson

(By the same author: #2 has also read What Should I do with My Life?)

You’re not fooling anyone when you take your laptop into a coffeeshop.  By Scalzi.  We both love grade-A snark.

Wrapped, by Jennifer Bradbury:  We already talked about this one in a previous what are we reading, but now #1 has read it!  She loves it too and eagerly awaits new books by the author (especially if there’s a sequel!)  Another relatively recent author to watch out for (we see there’s a 2008 novel as well– it doesn’t look as “frothy” though).

#2 has been reading a lot of books about horses.  I’ve gotten to the point in my riding lessons where reading a book would actually be interpretable.  So far, so good.

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury: a slim book, worth reading, but not worth keeping.  I just don’t want to hear that many stories about boyhood in the past.

Meanwhile…

This PSA has been brought to you by Grumpy Rumblings.

What are you reading?

One-Line Book Summaries

The Secret Garden:  THE GARDEN IS A METAPHOR.

The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World:  Harrrrrrgle.

Anna Karenina:  Russians are angsty.  Also, agriculture.

The Honor Harrington series:  Spaceship makes slingshot maneuver around planet.  Also, shooting missles; military bureaucracy; treecats.

Heidi:  Fresh air and good food will cure all your problems.

Help us come up with more one line book summaries!

RBOC

• I don’t understand when parents complain about their kids growing up.  My kid just keeps getting cooler and cooler with each new stage.  I can’t wait to see what adulthood will bring, while still enjoying every moment of the present.  Of course, I’m not crazy about kids as a general thing– there’s about a 2 year moving window around my own kids that I find other children adorable.
• We are happy to see women’s heads returning to book covers.  What a weird fad.
• Did you know that the first practical use of the birth control pill was as a fertility medication?  Some women (those with PCOS, for example) with no cycle or irregular cycles are fertile right after going off the birth control pill.
• DC seems to be hooked on the Chinese-American version of Dora the Explorer: Ni Hao Kai-Lan.  Not sure why this one is so interesting when ze has seriously outgrown Dora.  (Not that *I* have outgrown Dora…)
• Dear anonymous commenter who says she is sick of reading about working moms who have it all but OMG have messy houses (“because they’re chic now”… not a comment I had heard yet, though it would be awesome if they were– I would totes be a trend-setter, and I would *LOVE* it if people stopped feeling guilt about having messy houses because that’s healthier), and when we talk about how we’re awesome we’re just trying to convince ourselves, and when she has kids she’s going to take time off to be with them because otherwise why have kids… Sorry I’m more awesome than you are (as are a small handful of other working mothers who are brave enough to openly admit that their lives don’t suck!  Even though we get attacked when we do, probably because the patriarchy hates it when women do anything with their time besides raise boy babies…) and btw, it is possible to enjoy kids and have a career at the same time.  Even if your brain can’t imagine it.  In fact MOST mothers are not secretly falling apart… perhaps most mothers on the internet are (or at least pretend to be because dude, otherwise the anonymous patriarchy-bitches attack!), but perhaps mothers who don’t spend hours on the internet are just better at using their time wisely.
• Adding to that… I don’t get it when people say they hate reading about other people’s happy lives.  If your life isn’t happy (and you’re not dealing with a chronic disease etc.) then why don’t you @#$3ing change something?  Why be a victim?  Sure, we rumble grumpily, but we don’t put up with crap we can change either.  We’ll whine about the patriarchy, but we’ll keep on fighting it.  We’ll keep reading Georgette Heyer because we like the happy endings.  We love happy endings in real life even more and wish more people had awesome partners like ours and so on.  The world would be a much better place.
• Why when discussing their gifted children, do mothers feel the need to qualify that they themselves were only above-average intelligence (though they were never actually tested)?  Even when not asked.  IBTP.  (Btw, both #1 and #2 were gifted, probably in the HG/EG/PG range, if such things can be boiled down into percentage terms, as were our partners even though we don’t know our “numbers”.  And we are totes unapologetic about it (though we love meeting other gifted peeps!  Even if they don’t think they’re gifted.).  #1 mourns what she could have been had she been able to live up to her full potential and is still trying to make up for those wasted years in K-8 counting ceiling tile dots.  Every year she gets more awesome.)  Men, for some reason, don’t seem to have this problem.  Are we really so afraid that people will think we’re bragging about ourselves that we have to put our intelligence down at every opportunity?  It adds to that atmosphere of silence that mothers of gifted kids already feel.  (Wait, I gotta apologize for my intelligence just when I’m finally brave enough to talk about my kid’s?  Swell.)