Tanya Huff’s Peacekeeper series continues the story of Torin Kerr and her associates. The war over and retired from the marines, they’re now working for the Justice Department to address the new sorts of law enforcement problems: Humans First extremists, hostage takers, gun runners, etc. The first two books are An Ancient Peace and A Peace Divided.

Elizabeth Moon’s new Vatta’s Peace series follows on from Vatta’s War with two volumes released so far: Cold Welcome and Into the Fire. I got sick of waiting for the mass market release and bought the trade paperbacks of these two and they are next in my reading queue.

Mike Shepard’s Kris Longknife series is a long one: Kris Longknife - Admiral and Kris Longknife - Emissary are something like the 15th and 16th books that focus on Kris herself. Contrary to the adage, you’re pretty safe judging these books by their covers: an easier reading, more popcorn-y Honor Harrington with dirt-side gun fights instead of capital ship engagements.

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s Agents of Dreamland and the newly released Black Helicopters feature the operatives of several agencies dealing with Kafkaesque bureaucratic dysfunction and horrors from beyond. Think the X-Files versus Cthulhu, and something like the Atrocity Archives played straight.

Margaret Killjoy’s The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion and The Barrow Will Send What it May series follows travelling anarchist Danielle Cain and a few companions in some sort of anarchist Scooby Doo contemporary fantasy horror where the cops are at least as much a threat as the monsters.

Kylie Chan’s Scales of Empire is something of an odd one. Human settlement of other systems is just getting underway - news of the first few generation ships to reach their destinations is just getting back to Earth - when contact is made with a space-going dragons and the galaxy spanning empire they rule. I’d call it more fantasy in space and sci-fi.

I really enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti and Binti: Home and have Binti: The Night Masquerade waiting for me in my to-read pile. Kabu Kabu is a collection short stories from a different, but still super great, vein.

Dick Francis was a jockey and then went on to write mystery novels which (as far as I know) all involved horses in some way. I recently re-read The Edge and Comeback after first reading them on paper when my uncle left them behind on a vist in the 90s.

In 2009 I supported Robin Sloan’s Kickstarter project to write and publish a book (I’d called it a novella). It was the only successful Kickstarter project I ever backed and produced Annabel Scheme (I still have a few copies somewhere). Sourdough is more recent and I bought and read it on my Kindle well after publishing. Both are great, but I enjoyed Sourdough quite a bit more.

Hiromi Kawakami’s The Nakano Thrift Shop (translated by Allison Markin Powell) is a slice of life novel with no particularly fascinating characters and no exciting or momentous events. Still a good read.

There was quite a lot more, but this is probably the cream of the crop. Feel free to contact me to discuss or suggest books.

Fiction

Young Babylon by Lu Nei was really good. It’s great books like this that make me think I should venture out of my genre ghetto more frequently and read more literary fiction!

I’m not much of a mystery reader by I quite enjoyed the first two books in Elizabeth Edmondson’s A Very English Mystery series: A Man of Some Repute and A Question of Inheritance.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Glamourist Histories series is part Regency drama part magic-wielding fantasy. Unlike most fantasy works the magic in this world is more of a fine art than a practical or learned concern and more the domain of accomplished young ladies than swashbuckling adventurers or wise elders. It’s this departure from the norm that makes the series so interesting. I’ve only read the first book Shades of Milk and Honey but the rest of the volumes are on my to-read list.

I re-read the first two books of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire His Majesty’s Dragon and Throne of Jade. I quite like these two books but the series wears on me as it goes on and I don’t think I’ve ever managed to finish the third book. Maybe it’s something about Napoleonic naval books because I had the same thing happen reading the Hornblower books too.

Speaking of re-reading I read The Seeress of Kell, the fifth and final book in David (and Leigh) Eddings’ Mallorean series. These books (the 12 novels proper and 1 of background material) have been favourites of mine for around 20 years.

I read two of Katherine Kerr’s story collections – Dark Magicks: Two Tales and Deverry: Three Tales – which were both good, but I’ll read pretty much anything set in her Deverry world. I also tried one of her newer ‘urban fantasy’-ish series with Sorcerer’s Luck. Set in some contemporary North American city but with Nordic magic-y stuff, it was better than the “sexy vampires” urban fantasy slop that’s so popular the last few years (thanks for that Laurell K. Hamilton) but not my cup of tea.

Mercedes Lackey

I read and reread a bunch of Mercedes Lackey books toward the end of the year.

I reread the Owl Mage Trilogy (or Darien’s Tale): Owlflight, Owlsight, and Owlknight; and The Mage Storms: Storm Warning, Storm Rising, and Storm Breaking (though I read them in The Mage Storms Omnibus).

I quite enjoyed a newer series The Collegium Chronicles: Foundation, Intrigues, Changes, Redoubt, Bastion. The two books in the follow-on series The Herald Spy Trilogy have been not quite as good so far: Closer to Home and Closer to the Heart.

Leaving Valdemar, I find Lackey’s Elemental Masters series a bit hit and miss but I quite enjoyed Blood Red. Think Red Riding Hood hunts werewolves, vampires, and other rogue magicians.

Science Fiction

Engineering Infinity by Charles Stross

Flash by L.E. Modesitt Jr

Non-fiction

The Noticeably Stouter Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd was entertaining, as is the No such thing as a fish podcast produced by the QI elves which I mentioned in my recent recommended podcasts post.

The Shochu Handbook by Christopher Pellegrini was an interesting introduction to shochu (a form of distilled spirit from Japan). It induced me to try the little bottles of shochu I’ve had since I visited Japan in 2011.

The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics by Dona Wong is an introduction to real infographics – charts, diagrams, etc. – for journalists and the like. If you need to produce real infographics and are not a designer you’ll likely find this useful.

Philosophical Letters by Voltaire was by turns interesting and tedious. I don’t think I’ll bother reading any more Voltaire.

Short

On Rumours by Cass Sunstein describes the way in which rumours arise and are spread. I think it would have been improved with more discussion of empirical results but it was interesting nonetheless.

I managed a few of Black Inc.’s series of essays Short Black mostly as a late-December attempt to reach my target of 50 books. Alas, I haven’t made it but the three Short Blacks I read were pretty good No Fixed Address by Robyn Davidson, The Australian Disease by Richard Flanagan, and especially Fat City by Karen Hitchcock, Booze Territory by Anna Krien, and The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999 by John Birmingham.

Gods of Metal by Eric Schlosser describes the remarkable success of the Plowshares movement at breaking into various military bases, storage facilities, missile silos, ships, hangers, and other parts of the US nuclear weapons military-industrial complex. I’d ordinarily have skipped this – expecting a breathless accounting of megatons and MIRVs and death-tolls – but the focus was very much on the activists and it was a great read.

I quite liked A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees by Kenko and The Life of a Stupid Man by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa from Penguin’s Little Black Classics series but found the Goethe and Sappho volumes tedious.

• Thomas Paine, Common Sense
• Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• Harry Brighouse, Justice
• Alastair Hannay, On The Public
• Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• Jonathan Mills (ed.), Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power
• Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
• Chris George, The Book of Digital Photography
• Karen Cheng, Designing Type
• Gordon Rennie, David Bishop, Simon Jowett, Peter Evans & James Swallow, I Am the Law
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

I’ve just finished reading Undead and Unwed by MaryJanice Davidson (who has a blog), the first in her Undead series. It was a good read and it is certainly an interesting departure from the other books in this genre I’ve read (though Betsy did remind me of Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse).

I’m not sure if the next book will continue the theme (judging by the excerpt, I think not), but Betsy brought to mind David Eddings’ description of his hero, Garion, as a “Sir Perceval”:

Sir Perceval […] is dumb – at least right at first… A dumb hero is the perfect hero, because he hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s going on, and in explaining things to him, the writer explains them to his reader.

In any case, I’ll definitely have a look at the rest of Davidson’s books.

My copy of Megatokyo volume 4 finally came in and I bought it yesterday. It’s good to see another Megatokyo book out and it’s fantastic that it took so long to come in (having sold out, etc.).

The presentation is essentially the same as the first three volumes by Dark Horse. The only shortcoming I can see in the book is the binding – for some reason CMX couldn’t manage to glue the pages level. It’s no worse than the last book from Dark Horse and it is a fairly minor flaw, but it would have been nice if they’d put that little bit extra into the book’s construction.

On the “reading” front, I purchased my copy of Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages (companion and somewhat successor to TAPL) this morning. I’ve had a bit of a flick through it and it looks really, really interesting. Hopefully having spent almost $200 on the two books will provide an added incentive to not only start, but finish, reading them and hopefully even work through the problems.

I’ve been thinking about typography and book design lately which has suggested, amongst other things, that I see if it’d be possible to get my copy of ATTAPL rebound with some extra pages. It would be nice, for example, to insert the extended version of chapter 10 - the essence of ML type inference and to “fix” any errata with updated pages. I imagine, though I haven’t bothered to investigate at all, that this’d be quite a difficult and expensive thing to do for a single copy, so it’ll probably be a long while before I do it, if ever.

Before that though, I’ve been focussed on getting through Logic by Greg Restall. I’m almost half way through and while I’d have preferred a slightly difference syntax (I prefer ∧ as conjunction, rather than &), it’s easy to read and is much more accessible than most other books I’ve seen with titles like “Logic”.

If you haven’t read the Eddings’ work yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. Get thee to a bookshop and grab The Pawn of Prophecy or The Diamond Throne (book one in the Eddings’ other great pair of series: The Elenium and The Tamuli).

After an introduction to the beingness of the thinghood of constructs (named, described phenomena as far as I can tell), this book launches straight into extracts describing some of the most important and influential experiments in mathematics education. I’ve read the first chapter which describes a number of experiments that have been used to investigate the way children learn mathematical concepts. So far it has been a good deal more readable than I was expecting.

I happened to spot Logic: An Introduction on the shelf and needed to buy it. Hence, now that I’ve got a bit of money to spare, I have bought it. I expect it will be brilliant.

I’ve already read one volume from Routledge’s Thinking In Action series and, as previously noted I really liked it. Hopefully On The Public will be just as good.

I’ve liked some of the other books in Penguin’s Great Ideas series, so I hope that Conspicuous Consumption will be just as interesting.

1. functional data-structures, amortised analysis, etc.;

2. testing and specification with QuickCheck;

3. programming with folds, unfolds, etc.;

4. music programming;

5. representing financial contracts;

6. graphics programming;

7. hardware description;

8. combinators;

9. arrows; and

10. phantom types

amongst other topics. This looks to be a fascinating mixture of methods (data-structures, testing, folds, arrows, etc.) and applications (music, graphics, financial contacts, hardware description, logic programming, etc.) if a little thin for its price.

Both the software from the book and details about the symposium from which its content comes are available on the Oxford Computing Laboratory web-site.