Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, September 2015

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Linda Nagata, The Trials

Sequel to First Light, where the consequences of that adventure come home to roost. — If I say that these novels are near-future military hard science fiction, full of descriptions of imaginary technologies and of stuff blowing up, and clearly inspired by an anxious vision of America's ongoing decline, I am being perfectly truthful, and yet also quite misleading. People who enjoy books which fall under that rubric will find it very much the sort of thing they like; at the same time, normally I'd pay to avoid having to read such works, and yet found these two quite compelling, and eagerly await the conclusion.

ObLinkage: Nagata's self-presentation.

Letizia Battaglia, Passion, Justice, Freedom --- Photographs of Sicily

Battaglia comes across as a bit of a crazy woman, but in a deeply admirable way; and, of course, a tremendous photographer.

Paul McAuley, In the Mouth of the Whale

Hard-SF space opera, set in the same future as his terrific The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, but many centuries later. (He's good at filling in enough of the back-story to make it separately readable.) In this book, we're plunged into a conflict over the star system around Fomalhaut among four different more-or-less-post-more-or-less-human clades, seen from three points of view, two of which prove to be peripheral grunts. (Spoiler: Jung, rneyl ba, nccrnef gb or bar bs gur zbfg uhzna ivrjcbvagf cebirf, va snpg, gb or cebsbhaqyl fgenatr, gubhtu guvf vf fbzrguvat ernqref bs gur cerivbhf obbx pbhyq thrff.) I thought it was very good, though not quite as great as those two earlier books.

Edward K. Muller (ed.), An Uncommon Passage: Traveling through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail

A decent collection of essays, and really pretty photos, on the natural and human history of what is today a bike route from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland (and so on to Washignton, D.C.), but has had a lot of other incarnations over the centuries. Of only local interest, but locally interesting.

ObSnapshots: From a bike trip last year.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

Mind candy mystery: In which the Satanic panic of the 1980s meets the economic collapse of family farming, and makes for something bitterly poisonous and engrossing. (Though arguably not as poisonous as some of what actually happened back then.)

Carolyn Drake, Wild Pigeon

Photos, collages and a translated story, meant to illustrate the contemporary life of the Uighurs in Xinjiang. Bought from the author; I learned about it from the New York Review blog.

Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce

I picked up this middle volume of a trilogy, without having read the first book, because someone left it in a free-books pile at work, and I was curious. Whoever got rid of their copy: thanks. This is a truly fascinating look at the development of the market economy and capitalism in early modern Europe, and to some extent in the rest of the old world at the same time, full of fascinating information (*) and perspectives, as well as chewy and questionable hypotheses.

One notable feature, for me, is that Braudel wants to distinguish between the development of a market economy and the development of capitalism. He does this not to suggest an early-modern pre-history for market socialism, but because he identifies capitalism with "the realm of investment and of a high rate of capital f