Hello friends! Remember me? I’m still here, just haven’t been posting lately. I’m sorry! I could say lots of things about life being busy, but when is life not busy? I have three posts I’ve been tinkering with that I’ll get to.

Anyway, it’s a New Year, which means we get to talk about important things, like how many books1 we read this year, and what we hope for the Next Year (which will be a follow-on post). To answer the immediate question: per LibraryThing stats, I read 69 books this year, which is a personal record (I think the old number was 54). So clearly I am a great person, and you should be envious of me. However, a large number (24 by my count) of these are individual short stories, and 10 were YA stuff2. So my list isn’t that impressive! Also the vast majority were audiobooks, so if you’re one of those people, feel free to mock me. I have small children, so sue me. The commute into work and home is my best time to read. I did end up reading 3 ebooks and 8 hard copies.

Best Book of the Year: by pure ratings, it should be either The One Who Walks Away from Omelas by LeGuin or The Green Hills of Earth by Heinlein. Both are fantastic in different (Omelas as philosophical treatise, Green Hills as a masterclass of economical world-building and narrative). But it feels unimpressive to say your favorite stories are short stories, so I’m going to go with one of my 4.5 star winners and edge it out to Perelandra by C. S. Lewis (book 2 of his Space Trilogy), beating out Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

I actually read a lot of Jack this year; all of the Space Trilogy and all of the Chronicles of Narnia (at least the first two editions of which I had read previously as a child). I’ve previously read Till We Have Faces, which means I only have left to read The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Screwtape Letters (which I didn’t count as fiction, but sure why not) left to complete the Lewis Literary Universe (fiction variant). TPOT talks a lot about That Hideous Strength, and I enjoyed that one more as pure narrative; I just thought Perelandra was an incredibly beautifully-written allegory on Christianity. There are people who are better than Lewis at narrative (even if you’re limiting to “among the Inklings!”); there are few better at allegory. Additionally, I thought Geoffrey Howard’s3 narration was beautiful and did an incredible job of capturing the humanity of the characters involved-even the human villains feel like real relatable people.

A Scanner Darkly was also an incredibly written book about both the hopelessness and even banality of addiction. It’s not going to be a book you walk away happy from, and I am choosing to be happy. Paul Giamatti’s narration was pretty great as well, he really added in a sense of paranoia to the book that fits the overall theme of the book.

Worst Book Of the Year: Again, there’s a tie at the bottom. Our contenders here are Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn and A Very Strange Trip by L. Ron Hubbard (although apparently it’s really a very early piece from Dave Wolverton working from an LRH short story; I had never heard of Wolverton before bu he was apparently very influential to SF guys from Utah). Easy tie-breaker here; A Very Strange Trip was awful light SF comedy but it didn’t make me mad. Punished by Rewards infuriated me; it’s a book about how supposedly ACKSHUALLY rewards are bad and we should never use them because they just make people do worse, according to large numbers of extremely real studies (from the people who gave us the replication crisis!).

I will suspect that “counterintuitively, rewards disincentive people” probably is kinda true, at least for the kinds of people who get into Ivy League schools as undergrads and then can create an interdisciplinary studies plan to graduate. I just don’t think those kinds of people are representative of most of society4, and I think most of the people who read this book and want to apply it are also not going to be benefitted by following its advice.

Most Pleasant Surprise of the Year: All at Sea, which I already reviewed (probably my best review so far! I know, I know, a crowded field of contenders)! It was, as I noted, a wonderful peak into a world I was already acquainted with, but hadn’t gotten to delve into too deeply.

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Most Frustrating Book(s) of the Year: The Boy on the Bridge is a biography of former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shaliskashvili, who is a strong contender for the title of “Most Accomplished Georgian-American” (to be fair it’s not a terribly big field; probably his nearest competition is George Balanchine?). I was excited because Shalikashvili was always a name I remember from my childhood as being distinctive, and from the brief description of the book he had a heck of a life. Alas, it fell short because of two big reasons factors. First, it has of the most infuriating structural choices I’ve ever seen: crafting a biography through chronological flashbacks (ie we start at the “present day”, and then flashback to a period of time in his life, going further along and closer to “present day” as we go. It makes sense in a TV miniseries). There’s a reason a conventional linear approach is the way to go with a biography; it works. I’m sure there are people who have the writing chops to pull it off but Mr. Marble (former think-tanker) is not one of them.

Second, and probably more importantly, if you’re writing about a guy who gets all the way to be the senior officer in the United States military-the world’s most powerful fighting force when he’s in the seat, it’s important to discuss the impact he has. It’s too big a seat to just keep warm. And what is Shaliskashvili’s impact? None, because four years after he leaves a certain Tuesday in September happens and we go to war with the Army we have. Interestingly, you could probably credit Shaliskashvili with the HADR (Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief) mission set, in that he’s a pretty big reason we have it…but the author doesn’t bring it up, which is a lost opportunity. There were actual combat operations that were conducted during his time-notably the air campaign in Bosnia, which would be really relevant to him-but they aren’t given much coverage. There was a small section discussing the politics of getting selected as CJCS that I found really interesting because it’s not something we here discussed a lot, and a lot of discussion around the controversy of his father when he was the CJCS.

In some sense, Shali is extremely unlucky in that he follows the most influential CJCS of all time (quick, name the guy who was before Colin Powell without looking it up5?). And as noted already, he’s in charge of a brief and weird period of history where the US military was incredibly dominant but it’s not going to matter for very long, and it would be a bummer to look at his life story and say “Lulz and none of it mattered because the world changed”. But a good book would have still reckoned with that impact or lack thereof.

It’s sad because there will probably never be another bio of Shali.

For the runner-up: I still gave it 3 stars, but 22 Minutes is a book sold on an idea that it was explicitly unable to deliver on. From my LibraryThing review:

22 Minutes by Jeff Spevak is a biography of Ernie Coleman, an average Joe who was in the Navy in World War 2…The problem becomes if you are trying to approach it to learn about the title event: the hellish 22 minutes Ernie spent onboard USS Vincennes during the Battle of Savo Island, where she was sunk. And the problem here is, spoiler, Coleman never could talk about it, so it exists as a lacuna that the whole book has to be built around.

It’s a little unfair to judge a book based off something the author couldn’t deliver on through no fault of his…but guess what, this is my Substack, it’s not fair. Suck it up, Buttercup!

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Just Get to the List Already! Quit yelling at me, geez. But okay, here we go6

1. Green Hills Of Earth, Robert A. Heinlein, 5*-another note on this find from Hoopla: this appears to be read using an upgraded LLM voice with a British accent named “Peter Coates” (apparently not this guy). Good news: they fixed one of my big complaints and LLM now will use different voices for different speakers, especially for male and female speakers; it even will use slightly different accents, which is nice. Bad news: it’s still too even-toned and flawless, and it stands out. If you’re reading occasional short stories, you can ignore it, but it is noticeable and repetitive if you’re readng a collection. Also there are some interesting connections it won’t make (listening to “The Roads Must Roll”, and at one point they mention that the an important song is sung to the tune of the “The Caissons Go Rolling Along”; the clanker imparts recognizes that this supposed to be poetic and so put some rhythm in the reading but makes no attempt to put it in the correct tone, which is a revealing failure to me).

2. The One Who Walks Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin

3. Perelandra, C. S. Lewis, 4.5*

4. A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick, 4.5*

5. Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis, 4*

6. That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis, 4*

7. The Running Man, Stephen King, 4*

8. The Shootist, Glendon Swarthout, 4*

9. Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl, 4*-this was fun because I was reading it with my oldest child at the time

10. The Man in the High Castle, PKD, 4*

11. The BFG, Roald Dahl, 4*-see note for #9

12. All at Sea, Alan Loynd, 4*

13. The Early Stories of Philip K. Dick, PKD, 4*-weirdly my favorite here was “The Eyes Have It”, which is a rare PKD comedic turn

14. The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol 1, PKD, 4*-”The Electric Ant" was probably the best here

15. The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol 2, PKD, 4*

16. Mayday, JW Jones, 4&-Probably should be higher, a real standout I might review more later.

17. The Reason for God, Timothy Keller, 4

18. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, PKD, 4-borrowed from a library. Picked up to read a couple of the stories therein. “Faith of Our Fathers” is the standout here, although “Foster, You’re Dead!” was also moving.

19. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis, 4

20. At the Mountains of Madness, H. P. Lovecraft, 4*-my first Lovecraft novel.

21. The Mind Reels, , 4-will probably review later

22. My Man Jeeves, P. G. Wodehouse, 4*

23. Space Jockey, Robert A. Heinlein, 3.5*

24. Herbert West-Reanimator, H. P. Lovecraft, 3.5*-review coming but not really about the story itself

25. Gentlemen, Be Seated!, Robert A. Heinlein, 3.5*

26. Serving the Reich, Philip Ball, 3.5

27. Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley, 3.5

28. The Cosmic Puppets, PKD, 3.5*

29. To the Stars, L. Ron Hubbard, 3.5*

30. Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis, 3.5*

31. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis, 3.5*

32. The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis, 3.5*

33. The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis, 3.5*

34. The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis, 3.5*

35. The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis, 3.5*

36. The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky-ruined by narration; the narrator had three voices: standard (men), slightly higher pitched (women), standard but slurred (Lebyadkin). That really hurts in a novel where a most of the narrative is conveyed via dialogue. Will probably try and go back and read it in hard copy one day, maybe with a newer translation as well (I had the Garrett translation).

37. Beyond All Weapons, LRH, 3.5*-”The Invaders” might be the best thing I’ve ever read from LRH, and “Strain” isn’t bad, actually. “Beyond All Weapons is a fantastic exercise in world-building wasted on a dumb twist. Without the title piece I’d probably put this at 4-”The Invaders” really was that good!

38. Searchlight, Robert A. Heinlein, 3.5*

39. 2 B R 0 2 B, Robert A. Heinlein, 3.5*

40. Flying Aces of World War 1, Gene Gurney, 3-found in a flea market. 1960s YA non-fiction about WW1 aces. Book fell apart by the end of my reading and is now in my “kindling for the fire pit” pile. Yes, I burn book why do you ask.

41. Unconventional Warfare 2.0 , Christopher Rawley, 3

42. 22 Minutes, Jeff Spevak, 3*

43. A Chef on Ice, Sebastien JM Kuhn, 3&

44. The Defenders and Other Stories, PKD, 3*

45. Of Withered Apples, PKD, 3*

46. The Adjustment Bureau, PKD, 3*

47. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 3*

48. Electric Dreams, PKD, 3*

49. The Baron of Coyote River, LRH, 3*

50. The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer, PKD, 3*

51. The Devil - with Wings, LRH, 3*

52. A Single Pebble, John Hersey, 3-This was apparently my mother-in-law’s copy from…HS? College? Anyway, a mildly interesting story that suffers from having been to death since then and from the narrator being the least interesting person around. It does have the phrase “He will discover a new way for a turtle to make love to a rock”, which, when de-bowdlerized back into its original riverman slang, is pretty funny.

53. Delilah and the Space Rigger, Robert A. Heinlein, 3*

54. Arctic Wings, LRH, 2.5*

55. Black Towers to Danger, LRH, 2.5*

56. Boy on the Bridge, Andrew Marble, 2.5&

57. The Crack in Space, PKD, 2.5*

58. The Golden Man, PKD, 2.5*

59. Strange Eden, PKD, 2.5*

60. Radio Free Albemuth, PKD, 2.5*-I mostly sought to focus on fiction this year; not sure which if this fulfills that requirement. A very strange story.

61. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes, 2.5* I remember reading (part of?) this in (middle?) high school, and wanted to revisit. Called sci-fi but it’s not, maybe best understood as fantastical reality.

62. Lies, Inc, PKD, 2.5*-Just read Faith of Our Fathers, it covers the most interesting parts much better

63. The Man Who Found Out, Algernon Blackwood, 2*

64. Final Blackout, LRH, 2*-interesting in that it was written prior to World War 2. Not good, though.

65. One Was Stubborn, LRH, 2*

66. The Women, Kristen Hannah, 1.5*-hilariously bad, will probably do a review on this. I got a free copy of this from my library for their “winter reading” competition.

67. The Great Secret, LRH, 1*

68. Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn, 0.5*

69. A Very Strange Trip, Dave Wolverton, 0.5*

Would you be able to give me a visual presentation of your scores? Odd request but it turns out that graphic display in Excel is one of my hobbies. Here you go!

In my next segment, I’ll discuss my hopes and dreams for next year!

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Part 1 of Adventures in Narration

The Golden Man/Of Withered Apples/Strange Eden, by Philip K. Dick (Audiobook, narrated by Scott Miller 2/5, 3/5, 2/5, from Hoopla).

So normally, I mostly read non-fiction. For very random reasons I don’t remember anymore, I decided this year to take a year and read more fiction, just to see how The Other Half live. Also, for reasons I can’t really figure out, I’ve been trying to read as much Philip K. Dick as I can.

From the standpoint of a reader who focuses on audiobook (like most readers do now, I suspect), PKD is great because he had a significant career revival from movies in the 00s that was perfectly timed to make a lot of his stuff become of interest to publishers to translate onto audiobooks; of guys I’ve looked at and followed closely, I think he may have one of the highest “Age to Audiobook Ratio”1 around, which is a medium confidence datum on how good an older author is, or at least how approachable it is to a modern audience. Obviously, there are tons of books from prior eras that in theory can be read if you want (and are content with either sketchily acquired ebooks or are rich and can shell out for rare physical copies), and lots of bibliophiles will sell the inherent “permanence” of books as a reason for their hobby being so special and noble-you can pick up a book from any time and get just as much enjoyment as a brand new one! There’s a well-nigh unlimited corpus for you to browse! How wonderful!

It’s mostly a lie, of course. First off, as alluded to, there are very real limitations on getting older books. Your format preferences can make big differences here; your library probably doesn’t have large numbers of copies of older (defined as more than 20 years old, I guess?) fiction, for example. Staying in sci-fi, for example, Clifford D. Simak was a giant of the genre in the 1950s/60s-SFWA Grandmaster, three Hugos and Nebula. My library system has exactly one of his books (a collection of short stories), and he’s in four other collections. That’s it for physical books if you’re a hardcore2. There are 9 ebooks3 available DRM free through the library (shoutout to Duke Classics for their efforts to dump out DRM free junk from the ancient days; along with the folks at Project Gutenberg. You’ve given me many gigabytes of stuff to fill my computer with). And if you want to listen to his story on your commute-nada. Nothing is out there.

Also, you may simply not be able to actually read/understand it, because despite how much people say they love books, even people who do read tend to not read challenging stuff and might not actually be very good at reading anyway, and there’s a point where things become so old and written differently as to be incomprehensible (Phraedra by Racine is one of the bottom-rated things on my LibraryThing page; I just remember it being awful, largely due to these issues).

Also, as I think I’ve noted, a lot of the loudest bibliophiles are only reading modern stuff anyway4. Who’s got time for Bleak House when James Patterson keeps Andy Warholing his name onto other people’s works releasing new stuff? Why should my library keep a copy of some guy named Ernest K. Gann’s work when it needs to buy 17005 copies of the newest Kristin Hannah novel!

Overall, it generally took being above a certain threshold of talent/enduring fame6 for an older book to warrant the expense of creating an audiobook, and Dick had a combination of those things and a late and unexpected career resurgence that made it work. Most people just weren’t worth the effort to try.

And then came AI, and specifically high quality voice emulation.

Suddenly, it cost almost nothing to be able to crank out audiobooks, with a pretty decent narrator available only at the cost of some compute time. I first started noticing it in 2023 in one of the Overdrives, when odd books would start getting released on audiobook and the description would note the narration was done with a synthetic narrator (although they would obscure it in gallery view, describing the author as “AI Marcus”, with your brain naturally converting the capital I to a lower-case L).

I describe the books as “odd” because they tended to be stuff that was obscure or otherwise not notable and/or in the public domain. Best guess is these were early test efforts to see how the narration could do; it’s not like releasing this would cause legions of PooleBwois and Gurlz to explode with rage on BookTok was going to be horrified at the butchering of his work by a robot. Ernest Poole is utterly forgotten. And honestly, I might even accept this as a good use case (I don’t know that I would read it, but barring some bizarre revival of 1910s-1920s “proletarian-tinged fiction”, there was no other way you were getting an audiobook of this7. Sometimes they’re pretty explicit about labeling the Narrator “Unknown (Synthesized Voice)”. That mostly occurs on products from academic presses.

But soon the AIPocalypse did fall upon us, and it fell very hard on Hoopla. So, so, so much stuff on there is AI slop, and I’m only even looking through the non-fiction stuff! There’s a continuum at work. Some of it seems to be entirely written and performed by AI (there’s an extremely specific description style that gets attached to these works-this is representative, the Haunted Walmart is real but it’s a good guess that “Denise Sandoval” isn’t). Some of it is AI pictures for a cover illustration and AI narration to existing works, usually from lesser/derivative works of more famous authors or compilations.

Which is of course, how I stumbled onto "Scott’s” work: hunting down some PKD short stories to inflate my numbers. I admit there’s some an element of irony in robots reading to me PKD stories, even though these ones aren’t from his most robot-y era.

The stories themselves are pretty forgettable; Of Withered Apples is the best because’s nicely atmospheric with a weird sexual tone to the whole thing (there’s sexual tones to all three, now that I think about it) and also it’s short, ending the story while there’s still mystery left to it. The other two are longer but there isn’t really enough story to sustain the length of it (they both reminded me of The Variable Man in that sense), with it mostly being inflated by Dick’s penchant for world-building (which works great in his novels but can be a major issue in his short stories). Overall, they’re fine. A few more numbers to add to my LibraryThing tracker, I guess (“If it has an ISBN, it’s a book”).

How did Messr Miller do, though? The good news is that if you’re expecting to listen to Siri clumsily stumble through a book, you won’t get that. The robot voice has a lovely timber and cadence that it uses, with a gravely tone that is faintly reminiscent of a deeper George Guidall, and a vaguely Western-y accent-it would have worked on Charles Portis novel. It doesn’t sound like what you would expect if you were told “narrated by AI” in advance (or if you’ve used Microsoft Word’s narration tool, which I have and do to give my work a once-over before pushing the publish button).

However…

…our friendly clanker struggles with a pretty basic skill of narrating audiobook, namely “having different voices you use”. Scott reads all the part-male, female, child, whatever-in the exact same tone and timbre. It doesn’t really matter if it’s believable-no one has any illusions when Scott Brick reads a female part that it sounds exactly like a female, but it should work well enough that you understand a female character is talking. But if you read everything in the same voice, conversations-especially with more than two people, and especially if they should sound different-become really hard to follow. And while his voice sounds fine, it also doesn’t fit the material. I don’t know what the voice of “Sci-Fi” should sound like-Lloyd James did a great job in the versions of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers I’ve listened to, but I don’t think of it as definitive, let’s put it like that-but this was most certainly not it.

The weirdest thing is Scott often read with rising intonation (which makes it feel like a question) and at a similar syntax. These books were very hard to pay attention to because of especially these last to flaws. This is surmountable for a 20 minute short story, but I could not imagine listening to it for 12 hours in a short story collection, or an actual book. The rising intonation thing is especially bizarre as a flaw because almost no human would do that; you can kind of guess why a bad AI model wouldn’t switch between male and “female” voices, but I’m not smart enough to guess why it’s hallucinating all these questions in the text. Overall, I will try and avoid AI-narration as much and as long as possible (I already look pretty hard at stuff on Hoopla for release dates as a rough filter for AI stuff); although on some stories it might be the only way to listen to it.

It’s clear that the careers of Jim Cummings and Robertson Dean8 are safe from AI Overlords for now. But how does “Scott Miller” compare to, say, an average human who has a passion for reading, but won’t be getting paid (very much) to do it? We’ll find out in our next installment!

1

Tom Holland (the British quasi-academic and co-host of the The Rest is History podcast) once noted that Hitler has replaced the Devil in the Western psyche as the embodiment of “Evil” (maybe this idea comes from Girard, though?). A consequence is that those who served him have become Evil themselves. Most of the time, the instinct seems to be to label Nazis and people who worked with them as Evil, and also Dumb. I suspect this is because it is more convenient to think of Evil People as dumb, so that Smart People can assure themselves that they could never be Evil because they are not Dumb. In fact, if Evil came along, they would fight it to the end, unlike the Dumbs who embrace evil things. But what happens when undeniably Smart encounter Evil and just…go along with it? Like, say…Nobel Prize-winning Smart, for example. Serving the Reich explores how the German scientific community reacted to the rise of the Nazis, mostly through focusing on three German physicists: Max Planck, Peter Debye (technically Dutch) and Werner Heisenberg. None of these men were themselves Nazis, ardent or otherwise, and yet all of them, upon encountering the Most Evil Thing Ever™, did not #RESIST2 and perhaps even complied (if not endorsed). Casting a giant frizzy-haired shadow over the whole process is Einstein3 who left Germany in 1933 due to Hitler’s rise to power and left the German scientific community to wrestle with its identity and the impact of the new field of quantum physics, which was itself heavily tied into Jewish identity due to battle over Deutchse Physik (this theme actually is a pretty major component of the book, but I’m not going to cover it too much because it would take a long time and I feel bad how long it’s been since I posted anything already so I need to get this out, and really the whole section is worth way better discussion than I can give).

So why would a Smart accept Literal Fascism? Well, Planck was an old man (74 in 1933) who grew up in a much more deferential society and simply did not think it was his duty to protest the actions of the government (which was still technically democratically elected), whatever he thought of their policies. Heisenberg was a young man (32 in 1933), and very ambitious; he thought that aligning with the Nazis would be the best way to ensure that theoretical-based physics continued to flourish (and also coincidentally ensure his career moved on). Understand with Heisenberg especially I’m oversimplifying; one impact on this book is I want to read a biography of Heisenberg, because he sounds fascinating). Debye was…complicated. He was Dutch not Deutch, so there’s the question of how much he really should been involved in deciding German things (and relatedly, how far he could go before he could be punished for it). It’s also seems like he probably didn’t care too much about the issue (it’s wrong to say he was antisemitic, but he does seem about modal in his attitudes towards Jews and the modal attitude in Germany was not exactly tolerant). In general, very few scientists cared who were not also Jewish cared too deeply about what was happening to Jewish scientists in the 1930s (von Laue is the exception that proves the rule here). Debye was, to paraphrase a Dutch report in the 00s on the controversy, no ardent Nazi, nor a resistance member. He was just a guy trying to do some Science, and if it meant signing Heil Hitler at the end of his letters, that was the cost of doing Science.

A thing that surprised me in the book (mostly related to the Deutsche Physik movement) was that there some very ardent actual Nazi scientists. Why would they do that? Well, older scientists hated quantum theory in general; quantum theory was very uh theoretical and thus math based and often hard to prove whereas they had all come up in world that was experimental based and you didn’t need a lot of math to make it work.4 A funny subtext here was that there was a golden age of physics where the level of knowledge in the field was so low that you could just kind of bumble your way through some experiments and end up getting a Nobel (this is Stark), and that your likelihood of an old guard guy hating quantum physics and supporting the Nazis seems inversely correlated to how good he was at math.5

Meanwhile, younger physicists were excited about fascism because they thought it was a good way to get to Year Zero, whence they could bring about the changes they needed to revitalize society. The enthusiasm for which younger scientists (and university students in general) had for the Nazis was something that I suspect a lot of college-age students who rail against fascism today. And much of the efforts are focused on winning grant money and jockeying to win favor with the Nazi leadership in the larger goal of career advancement up the Nazi cursus honorum.6

Okay, this has taken to long and is way longer than my previous efforts. I’m sorry about that. I’ll wrap it up. Overall I found this book a fascinating look at smart people and an excellent look at the world and worldview they operated at the time, and refreshingly good about how to grapple with their actions that may seem unthinkable to today’s eyes (even if they still don’t end up looking very good in the process).

So why did I only give it 3.5 stars? Well, it’s a grind to read. It always took me about 5-10 minutes in a session to really get into the book before I was enjoying it. It’s an academic book and written to a largely academic audience, and while it wasn’t overwhelming, it took effort to read through. The physics part wasn’t hard for me to follow, but I can’t vouch for everyone else about it. And there’s a massive cast of characters beyond the ones I’ve mentioned to keep track of. Definitely not light summer reading. I also I came into it thinking I would learn more about the German atomic research during World War 2, which I did a little, but that’s really not the point of the book.

Overall though, I think this was a highly rewarding book and it will probably be my most interesting non-fiction book I read this year. Highly recommended if you like reading about academic disputes and German physics, as well as understanding some of the background in physics that happening pre-WW2 (I finally watched Oppenheimer while reading this book earlier this year, and it was fun in the first part of the movie to see some of these issues being depicted on the screen in the first part of the movie, albeit not very well to me). But you would need to dedicate yourself to it to really appreciate, and in the end you might wind up being a little less confident about how you would have acted if you were in their position in 1937. Definitely pick it up if found in a dumpster!

All At Sea, by Alan Loynd (Audiobook, 4*, from Hoopla1)

I suspect that, like many kinds of media collector, people who get into hoarding acquiring books (and maybe even reading them; the latter goal is always more aspirational vs achieved) are driven by the thrill of finding The Hidden Gem; a book that no one else has found and that you can bring to the attention of the world (or the three people who read your Substack, which is basically the world to this stack). I don’t know if this is a true hidden gem or not, but it was a very pleasing read and I’m happy to recommend it to you…with a couple of caveats that have to be factored in.

All at Sea is the memoirs of Alan Loynd, a Brit who joined the merchant marine as a cadet (basically an intern for you wogs) in the Royal Fleet Auxiliary in 1969 ends up becoming a captain and working in the Hong Kong salvage and towing world. It’s a fascinating book to read because Loynd occupied a very liminal time of being a sea-dog: containerization2 has arrived and is becoming the norm, but break-bulk and general cargo is still what everyone understands and what the institutional memory of a merchant mariner’s job is (and he worked a lot of ports where containerization wasn’t the standard then and still might not be the standard today; I’ve pulled in places where the options for getting CONEX boxes off relies on the very iffy proposition of a container handler ashore working). He watches the world he grew up in and was trained for fade away.

Fortunately, by the time it’s truly gone, he’s already entered the world of off-shore support (driving smaller vessels that support oil rigs or other vessels) and then towing and salvage, a weird and highly specialized niche of the maritime world, where he continues to reside as a consultant. A SparkNotes version of the book can be found in this article.

The book avoids a major flaw that I see with a lot of memoirs, which is a narrative that becomes too repetitive with each chapter telling a specific section of his life but with all the same things happening in the different sections. Some of this is that in fact Captain Loynd’s career is more varied: he stayed in one field the whole time, but he worked in some very different aspects of that field (RFA, offshore, a merchant academy, towing/salvage world). Some of it is due to being an actually published book from an academic press and not an independently published ebook, so there was presumably a real editor who reviewed it at least once. Whatever it was, it was nice to see it not happen. Loynd’s writing is nothing special, but it’s also never distracting and the narrative was strong enough that I didn’t notice. And are you really getting this book for the prose, anyway? No, you get it because you like ships.

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Which brings me to the biggest caveat: do you like ships? I’m not quite willing to go full de gustibus on this is issue (I do think there is bad taste in books, or maybe better said I think there are bad books that are thought to be in good taste that really aren’t), but I do appreciate that most books are only interesting if you are interested in the subject already. I happen to like ships, having worked on them in the Navy for ~10 year or so3 so I was already primed to appreciate it. Indeed, it was a really interesting look at aspects I was aware of but had never interacted with much, like salvage and towing and writing contracts for that work. I didn’t need to pay too much attention to his discussion of parbuckling or breakaway bulkheads on an anchor chain because I was already familiar with what those were (vaguely in the case of parbuckling, anyway), but would I have enjoyed this as much if I didn’t? Doubtful. I can’t imagine enjoying this if I didn’t already like ships, and I suspect it would be easy to get lost.4

The biggest complaint you can make the production of the audiobook. Loynd narrates, and as far as merchant mariners go, he makes a pretty good narrator. I enjoyed his Devonshire accent, but I could see it being a distraction if you’re only used to more professional narrators. He also reads very slow: I normally listen at 1.2x, and I think I had to push this to 1.4 and it still felt like he was dragging. It’s very clearly a guy reading into the microphone on his laptop-you can hear him turning pages, you can hear him coughing, you can hear him getting lost a couple times and having to find the page again, and at one point you can hear construction machinery doing something in the background of a chapter, and it’s annoying. But I only hold professionals to the standards of professionalism, and Captain Loynd is not a professional audiobook narrator. For the most part I was able to look past that. Related to the earlier discussion I can’t judge if it would be overwhelming for a novice to listen to because I had a decent background already; I can’t tell you if any of his descriptions of some of the technical aspects are suitable for a novice, since they made perfect sense to an honored shellback like myself. And of course if there were any pics, I can’t judge how much they might have helped.

Overall, I’d definitely recommend this book if you find a copy in your local dumpster or other 2^nd hand source. It’s rewarding and fascinating for anyone with an interest in nautical affairs in the later half of the 20th century. Given it’s from an academic press, I suspect there aren’t that many in circulation anyway (there were none in my local library system, including searching the statewide database and the university-specific database). So you really have found a hidden gem if you uncover this (unless you’re dumpster diving in the Wan Chai, I guess). Might even be worth picking up new if you want to help out Captain Loynd. At the end of the day, I enjoyed reading it and I learned something, and that’s the most useful praise I can offer.

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(Cover has nothing to do with the story, BTW)

The Great Secret, by L. Ron Hubbard, (Audiobook, Galaxy Press, 2*, from Hoopla).

Included Stories:
-The Great Secret
-Space Can
-The Beast
-The Slaver

This is a collection of LRH pulp short stories. I’ve read a fair amount of these collections; this one is particularly bad because all of them are extremely derivative. You can describe every story as “LRH takes some genre and puts it IN SPACE.” The Great Secret? H. Rider Haggard-y adventure story but IN SPACE. Space Can? Age of Sail naval adventure but IN SPACE. The Beast? Safari horror but IN SPACE (okay in Venus). The Slaver? Sabbatini-esque swashbuckling but IN SPACE. The best individual story is Space Can, in that it’s pretty good Age of Sail but IN SPACE. I still wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s “good”, probably just a 2.5 star story on it’s own.

There is of course, nothing wrong with taking tropes from one genre and launching them into the vacuum and seeing what happens*, you just can’t port them over wholesale and expect the results to be good. The characters are all flat and dull, the writing is boring, the plot twists predictable (I picked the one in The Beast right after the 2nd clue; although per my wife I’m pretty good at picking out twists, at least according to the crime procedurals we watch). All the stories are too short to have any impact or build anything. Some of the writing is appropriately light and some of it was weirdly verbose (eg the word “surcease” appears, which delighted me but I suspect would confuse most readers today).

You can say, “Shoe, it was intended for kids!” Which maybe is true (genuinely not sure how much of the pulp fanbase was children vs just not very literate adults), but on the other hand, I can go to my library’s Facebook page and watch middle-aged adults proudly declare they are reading the “sci-fi classic The Maze Runner”, so I say it’s perfectly fine if I judge low-quality material by modern standards.

The big complement I will pay to this book is that like most of their productions, the fine Hubologists at Galaxy Press put some money into the production, and it shows. It’s a full-cast reading who all do excellent jobs. There is a touch of the kitsch and schlock to the whole performance. R. F. Daley as the main narrator does an excellent job, giving his best Zapp Brannigan impersonation. This works because Zapp Brannigan is a parody of the kind of characters that are in this book. I could have fun speculation about why so much effort went into this book and what the market for it is (other than dummies who waste their time reading forgotten books for the sake of #content on Substack) but I hope people got paid for it (in Thetans cleared if nothing else).

I guess it’s fine if you want some books to fluff up how many books you’ve read in a year so you can act cool something to listen to while washing the dishes and it needs to absorb less mental energy than an episode of The Rest is History. If you happen to come across one in the dumpster, just leave it there-it’s fine. It gets two stars because of the production quality and noen of the stories made me mad, they were all just dumb and light.

*you know what movie I want to see? Aguirre the Wrath of God but IN SPACE. Space is a hostile force that’s always trying to kill you; I wish more sci-fi would think about this (Gravity does a decent job). Maybe this movie exists and I just haven’t found it? Maybe it exists and it’s terrible? There’s a Star Wars movie they should make that subverts your expectations: Charismatic rogue smuggler captain leads his ragtag crew to a far off star-system in a broken-down ship to find a fabulous treasure…only for for the broken-down ship to start failing them and the Captain to be revealed as utterly insane and it all to be pointless anyway.

What a waste, that’s a perfectly good plastic bin

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A Short Introduction

Everyone is Substacking now. I hang out here enough I guess I should do the same. My goal for this Substack is to put out short (eg 3-4 paragraphs) reviews of books I read, maybe other media as well but that’s unlikely as I don’t consume lots of other media (other than Columbo episodes right now). My goal is a post a week; we’ll see how that goes. Some of it will be current reviews of things I have finished up, some of it will be old deep-dives in thing I read previously. As the title suggests, the goal is not to talk about books that people are reading but books that are (or will be) forgotten or not of interest to the vast majority of people, and frankly shouldn’t be. But they were of interest to me, at least. Blackshoe’s Book Dumpster is the working title of this stack; maybe I will find a better one.

“But what do you think about [this]?”

Maybe nothing, maybe lots! But other than comments or replies or whatever they are called, I won’t be discussing them for the most part. Will I stick to that? Who knows! It’s the plan but plans change. And people change; if you told high-school aged self about current self’s political beliefs, he would be surprised and disappointed (I think HS self would be disappointed by current self in general, though this is neither here nor there). Maybe I will talk about boxing since that’s another thing I like to talk about. Who knows! Maybe I’ll talk about my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my failures, etc? Who knows! I almost certainly won’t talk about politics or policy or things like that, because there are dozens of people writing about those things already, and they are much better at than I can hope to be and frankly care to spend the time on. I just want to talk about what books I’m reading and I don’t have a place to do that because I’m not really BookTok or BookStack material. I I like reading, I really do. I kinda dislike the community around reading, because I don’t fit in to it for many reasons. I normally don’t fit in, I’m pretty used to it by now. But sometimes it would be nice to have some place to just talk into the void. Maybe my opinions about things will sneak into my reviews, but it’s not my goal to stow them away in there.

“What kind of community are you looking to build here”

I don’t know, people who want to read about books? Not about the book industry or about literacy or about reading, just about books, maybe other things. Random books without connection to things going on. Sometimes classics or things from classic authors, sometimes things of interest or related to my previous life, sometimes terrible things I pick up off of LibraryThings or Little Free Libraries that should be forgotten.

I often find there to be a very sanctimonious attitude around reading and books that is pretty annoying. I especially find it annoying around discarding books; whenever a story about a dumpster full of books being found, people get huffy. “They should go to [a local library/a local school/a little library], they’re still useful!” No they’re not, few people want old books. That’s why they’re there. All those places are full of things like this, just one step up the line, waiting for their turn to go the dumpster. “People will read them!” No they won’t, I’ve tried to sell books on Ebay, no one wants that. Fine, I’ll read it and show you why no one wants them.

“Can I Pay You For This?”

No. That’s a terrible use of your money. My wife makes good money and I have a decent job so I don’t need it. There are people out there who really do need it; find them and support their work. Maybe one day I’ll care enough to open subscriptions, but that feels like a lot of work.

“Shouldn’t You Tell Us Something About Yourself?”

I should but I’m not going to. I probably should care deeply about OPSEC and worry about getting doxxed but I’m not quite schizo (yet) enough to work to prevent that from happening (which isn’t going to say I’m going to just dox myself). My life will dribble out (a lot of already has in comments).

“Use an image and “subscribe” buttons”

Okay, here’s a picture of a bunch of terrible books no one wants (no seriously, stop whining book nerds, no one wanted this stuff, the library had stats on this). That’s what my stack is about, books no one wants to read.