designcult

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2011

This is a list of the best books I read in 2011. The list is not a Top 10. For one thing, it's not in order. Also, not all of the books were published in 2011, though more of them were recent than is typical for me. All of these are books I read for the first time this year: I do a lot of rereading, but none of the reread books struck me as strongly as these did.

1. Ship Breaker (Paolo Bacigulpi)
   Absolutely the best novel I read this year. I enjoyed the one previous book of his I've read (The Windup Girl) but it did seem a little bit as if he were trying too hard to be dark. Ship Breaker has no such problems. It's ostensibly Young Adult, set in a post-apocalyptic (weather apocalypse version) Lousiana and starts among gangs of ragged youth breaking down old oil tankers for scrap piece by piece. The world-building is perfect, the structure is a concise, perfectly executed update of a classic adventure novel (Kidnapped or Treasure Island) and I would recommend it to anyone. 
    
   
2. Zero History (William Gibson)
   Finishes up the Blue Ant / Hubertus Bigend trilogy. When the trilogy started it felt lighter than the previous trilogies; having recently reread them all, I think it stand up very well. Plus, this one is largely about pants, and I appreciate a writer that can take pants seriously. 
   
   
3. What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly)
   Still mulling this one over. Kelly has a manic mix of total full-on messianic tecnology changes everything woo, but is more grounded (and more literate) than 99% of people with equivalent tecnophile woo. If you want a taste, go read this post on how few technologies truly die out. If you think that's neat, you'll like this book. 
   
   
4. A Night in the Lonesome October (Roger Zelazny & Gahan WIlson)
   Weird & wonderful. I have a soft spot for books narrated by dogs. Gahan Wilson does the illustrations, he's a gem. This is an older book I would never have heard about without Jo Walton's series of book reviews on Tor, she has a knack for highlighting semi-forgotten books that deserve to be read. 
   
   
5. I Shall Wear Midnight (Terry Pratchett)
   Another adult novel. I think the Tiffany Aching books are Pratchett's best works. They have a different tone than the other Discworld novels, and stand alone while working within that world. I think somehow they feel more serious (even though the Discworld novels have tackled some quite serious topics), possibly because Tiffany herself is never played for laughs, though funny things do happen around her. Especially when the Feegles are involved. 
   
   
6. Nobilis: The Game of Sovereign Powers (R. Sean Borgstrom)
   This isn't a novel, it's a very strange role-playing game in an extraordinarily beautiful physical book. It's disastrously out of print, tend to go for more than $100 on eBay, and I was lucky enough to find out about it by actually getting to play it at a friend's house, though briefly. I was hooked. I am one of those people who buys gaming books just to read them sometimes (sorry) and this book is a perfect example of why that is a terrible, and yet irresistible habit. On the one hand, it's an interesting game, and should be played. On the other, it's a grand and lunatic work of plotless fiction. Ask nicely, and I may let you look through it. 
   
   
7. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, Oxford History of the United States (Gordon S. Wood)
   I am in love with the Oxford US history series. This one and the next are long, cover basically everything, and are pretty well paced considering how complete they are attempting to be. If, like me, your understanding of US history between the Constitutional Convention and the War of 1812 is "something something XYZ affair something" then this will get you caught right up. My personal takeaways are mostly about how tenuous the early republic was: all worried about a return to monarchy, re-absorption by England (or some other power), or just falling apart into pieces altogether. From our point in history it all seems so inevitable, but really, none of it was. 
   
   
8. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Oxford History of the United States (Daniel Walker Howe)
   Still in love with the Oxford US history series. Lots of juicy stuff here about the increasing role of religion in public life, our emergence as an imperial power, and the truly terrifying white supremacist edge to it all. It's a pretty dark era, with few real heroes: William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the early abolitionists and activists against Indian genocide. But the presidents are a pretty nasty lot: Jackson (evil), Van Buren (inept), Harrison (dead), Tyler (useless), Polk (imperialist). John Quincy Adams comes across well. Reading about the "acquisition" of California was fun, though, as I now know the genesis of about 50% of the street names in my neighborhood. 
   
   
9. Reamde (Neal Stephenson)
   Probably not one of his important books. Totally one of his fun books. And sometimes, it's OK to have a really long, highly improbably adventure story written by a weapons-obsessed nerd. I'm also becoming convinced that, much as many novelists needed to get a 9/11 themed novel out of their system in the last decade, some novelists need to get a World of Warcraft novel out of their system. This is Neal's, and that's just fine. 
   
   
10. Finder: Voice (Carla Speed McNeil)
    Finder is one of those graphic novel series that fans get obsessive and evangelical about, and yet somehow most people have never heard of. It's science-fiction with heavy fantasy overtones, is written in this incredibly layered and dense way while having art that is clean and simple and spare and somehow pulls off tricks like having whole clans of characters that are near-clones of each other, and yet you can tell them apart on the page. If you haven't read any Finder, start with the new Dark Horse collected editions, but when you've read those, read this one next. 

There are 3 nonfiction books and 7 fiction books on this list. One of the fiction books is a graphic novel, one is an illustrated novel, two are marketed as Young Adult, and one is a game. Almost nothing takes place in the present-day real world, I do tend to science-fiction, fantasy, and history. The YA fiction is fully the equal of the "adult" fiction, and these days I appreciate a well-done "slight" novel as much (or more) as a more ambitious work.

What I'm thinking about this week

1. Boots! In January 1996, I was in London briefly, following a semester at Glasgow University. I bought a pair of Dr. Marten's boots from the flagship store in . They were a sort of wingtip half boot, and I loved them. That's them up on the right there. I've owned various boots over the years, and these were worn more and over a longer period of time than any others. Only a pair of boots acquired from Stompers in the 90s came close. The latter have been relegated to "garden use only" for a while now, and the Docs are just thrashed. Neither model is still made (though there are some things that come close). So last week, we went over to the Haight St. and I picked up a pair of Langstons in burgundy. And I'm in love all over again ...
2. Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. Despite being married to someone who knows a great deal about art history, I basically knew nothing about this painting or the painter (though I knew the image). I listen to the wonderful In Our Time BBC podcasts, so I got a thorough introduction from Melvyn Bragg's usual group of slightly dotty British academics. 
3. The history of finance, and investment theory. Not my usual area, but I'm being guided by Adam Nash's personal finance reading list and working my way through one by one. 
4. Visual (and to some extent audio) design in classic science-fiction movies. (And one newer one.) The ones with the white palettes, san serif typefaces and shininess.  Think 2001 and Saturn 3.  Also Tron Legacy, but the shiny white bits rather than the glowy black bits. Plus sinister computer voices like Hal and GladOS from Portal. The fun part is this relates to the previous item (at least in my head).
5. How most of the important developments & conflicts in online identity & authentication were predicted (sort of ) by Max Headroom. 
6. Occupy Wall Street. There's a lot to think about, but this post pointing out how strangely some of the OWS dynamic echoes Bruce Sterling's 1998 book Distractions I had to reread it. Sterling has a knack for predicting future socio-political events in ways SF doesn't usually quite do (see: drone assassinations in Islands in the Net). Distractions isn't nearly as good a book as Islands in the Net, but it has it's moments, and it certainly resonates today:
   
   

   “Why are there millions of nomads now? They don’t have jobs, man! You don’t care about ‘em! You don’t have any use for ‘em! You can’tmake any use for them! They’re just not necessary to you. Not at all. Okay? So, you’re not necessary to them, either. Okay? They got real tired of waiting for you to give them a life. So now, they just make their own life by themselves, out of stuff they find lying around. You think the government cares? The government can’t even pay their own Air Force.”

   “A country that was better organized would have a decent role for all its citizens.”

   “Man, that’s the creepy part — they’re a lot better organized than the government is. Organization is the only thing they’ve got! They don’t have money or jobs or a place to live, but organization, they sure got plenty of that stuff.”

Bits and pieces from Reality is Broken

Another book finished: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they can Change the World by Jane McGonigal. I've seen Jane speak at SXSW -- she's phenomenal. The core ideas are not new to me (because I've seen her speak), but she fleshes them out in more detail & adds some nuance and research. Which is nice, and increasingly rare for a Current Thinky Book -- I'm getting frustrated by books that don't have anything more to say than what the author's 20 minute TED talk said.

Anyway, these are the bits that caught my eye. More definitional & pragmatic, so more from the front of the book--the back of the book is more the world-changing ARG stuff, which is fine but not what I'm looking for right now.

First, an examination of two related concepts: hard fun and fun failure. (Funnily enough a Berenstein Bears book I was reading with my daughter also covered hard fun.)

Hard fun is what happens when we experience positive stress, or eustress (a combination of the Greek eu, for "well-being," and stress.) From a physiological and neurological standpoint, eustress is virtually identical to negative stress: we produce adrenaline, our reward circuitry is activated, and blood flow increases to the attention control centers of the brain.  (p 32)

But without positive failure feedback, this belief is easily undermined. If failure feels random or passive, we lose our sense of agency—and optimism goes down the drain. As technology journalist Clive Thompson reminds us, “It’s only fun to fail if the game is fair—and you had every chance of success.”

That’s why Nicole Lazzaro spends so much time consulting with game developers about how, exactly, to design failure sequences that are spectacular and engaging. The trick is simple, but the effect is powerful: you have to show players their own power in the game world, and if possible elicit a smile or a laugh. As long as our failure is interesting, we will keep trying—and remain hopeful that we will succeed eventually. (p. 67)

Next, some detail around Your MP's Expenses, a crowdsourced investigation by the Guardian after the UK expenses scandal (you may remember the floating duck island incident):

The game interface made it easy to take action and see your impact right away. When you examined a document, you had a panel of bright, shiny buttons to press depending on what you’d found. First, you’d decide what kind of document you were looking at: a claim form, proof (a receipt, invoice, or purchase order), a blank page, or “something we haven’t thought of.” Then you’d determine the level of interest of the document: “Interesting,” “Not interesting,” or “Investigate this! I want to know more.” When you’d made your selection, the button lit up, giving you a satisfying feeling of productivity, even if all you’d found was a blank page that wasn’t very interesting. And there was always a real hope of success: the promise of finding the next “duck pond” to keep you working quickly through the flow of documents.

A real-time activity feed showed the names of players logged in recently and the actions they’d taken in the game. This feed made the site feel social. Even though you were not directly interacting with other players, you were copresent with them on the site and sharing the same experience. There was also a series of top contributor lists, for the previous forty-eight hours as well as for all time, to motivate both short-term and long-term participation. And to celebrate successful participation, as well as sheer volume of participation, there was also a “best individual discoveries” page that identified key findings from individual players. Some of these discoveries were over-the-top luxuries offensive to one’s sense of propriety: a £240 giraffe print or a £225 fountain pen, for example. Others were mathematical errors or inconsistencies suggesting individuals were reimbursed more than they were owed. As one player noted, “Bad math on page 29 of an invoice from MP Denis MacShane, who claimed £1,730 worth of reimbursement, when the sum of those items listed was only £1,480.”

But perhaps most importantly, the website also featured a section labeled “Data: What we’ve learned from your work so far.” This page put the individual players’ efforts into a much bigger context—and guaranteed that contributors would see the real results of their efforts. (p. 222-223)

What I like about that is how easily you can imagine applying some of these things to non-investigative crowd-sourcing situations.

Also on crowdsourcing, a warning against building in compensation schemes:

The logic behind these practices is that if people are willing to contribute for free, they'll be even happier to contribute when they're compensated. But compensating people for their contributions is not a good way to increase global participation bandwidth, for two key reasons.

First, as numerous scientific studies have shown, compensation typically decreases motivation to engage in activities we would otherwise freely enjoy. If we are paid to do something we would otherwise have done out of interest--such as reading, drawing, participating in a survey, or solving puzzles--we are less likely to do so in the future without getting paid. Compensation increases participation only among groups who would never engage otherwise--and as soon as you stop paying them, they stop participating.

Second, there are natural limits on the monetary resources we can provide in a community of participants. Any given project will have only so much financial capital to give away; even a successful business will eventually hit an upper limit of what it can afford to pay for contributions. Scarce rewards like money and prizes artificially limit the amount of participation a network can inspire and support. (p. 242-3)

Finally, an explicit crowd-sourcing=MMORPG analogy with Wikipedia:

Second, Wikipedia has good game mechanics. Player action has a direct and clear result: edits appear instantly on the site, giving users a powerful sense of control over the environment. This instant impact creates optimism and a strong sense of self-efficacy. It features unlimited work opportunities, of escalating difficulty. As the Wikipedians describe it, "Players can take on quests (WikiProjects, efforts to organize many articles into a single larger article), fight boss-level battles (featured articles that are held to higher standards than ordinary articles), and enter battle arenas (interventions against article vandalism)." It also has a personal feedback system that helps Wikipedians feel like they are improving and making personal progress as they contribute. "Players can accumulate experience points (edit count), allowing them to advance to higher levels (lists of Wikipedians by number of edits)." (p. 230 -1)

Bits and pieces from Empire of Liberty

I just finished Charles S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. It's an awesome book, and since I don't think any American history from this period stuck in my head from school more than "blah blah XYZ affair blah blah Hamilton Burr duel blah War of 1812" I really needed to read it.

Three unrelated quotes struck me enough to preserve. The first is Madison's description of Jefferson, which I think could apply to half the genius geeks I know. (Or me, excepting the genius part.)

Madison knew his friend and knew that Jefferson's fanciful and exaggerated opinions were usually offset by his own very practical and cautious behavior. As Madison later remarked, Jefferson had a habit like "others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment." Indeed, it was often the difference between Jefferson's impulsive opinions and his calculated behavior that led many critics to charge him with hypocrisy and inconsistency. (p. 150)

Expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment. Awesome. I love that.

The next bit starts by relating the fad of calling things "mammoth" and ties it in to a subject that will be slightly familiar to West Wing fans, the Big Block of Cheese. (I say slightly familiar because this story relates to the Jefferson cheese, and the West Wing episode to the follow-up Andrew Jackson cheese.)

The most exciting scientific find of the period was Charles Wilson Peale's exhumation in 1801 near Newburgh, New York, of the bones of a mastadon, or mammoth. Peale displayed his mammoth inhis celebrated museum and in 1806 painted a marvelous picture of what was perhaps the first organized scientific exhumation in American history. Peale's discovery electrified the country and put the word "mammoth" on everybody's lips. A Philadelphia baker advertised the sale of "mammoth bread." In Washington a "mammoth eater" ate forty-two eggs in ten minutes.  And under the leadership of the Baptist preacher John Leland, the ladies of Cheshire, Massachusetts, late in 1801 sent to President Jefferson a "mammoth cheese," six foot in diameter and nearly two feet thick and weighing 1,230 pounds. The cheese was produced from the milk of nine hundred cows at a single milking, with no Federalist cows being allowed to participate. The president welcomed this gift from the heart of Federalism as "an ebullition of the passion of republicanism in a state where it has been under heavy persecution" (p. 393)

I do not know how the cows were checked for Federalism. Perhaps their stalls were checked for copies of the New York Post. (Did you know the New York Post was founded by Alexander Hamilton?)

I can also recommend A Big Cheese for the White House: The True Tale of a Tremendous Cheddar to folks with kids who'd like to learn more about this important cheese incident in our nation's history. It's a great book with awesome illustrations, and totally answers any practical questions you might have re: how you make a cheese that size and transport it.

Finally, a bit that tells us American politicians weren't always enemies of science:

When am American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying the United States did not make war on science. (p. 544)

Thief, thief, thief! Baggins!

I'm slowly reading "The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion" by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. It's a dense exegesis of LOTR and clearly for pretty obsessive Tolkien fans only.

It's a lot of fun, though. My favorite so far is finding out that baggins is, among other things, English country speak for afternoon tea.There's also layers of bag related language play: Bag-end is Anglicized cul-de-sac (which is in turn faux French), Baggins vs. Sackville Baggins, etc.

I like dense naming. See also Warren Ellis's explanation of how he names characters, in part:

For instance: I’m working on something right now where I think I’ve nailed the character name finally. Birch. Birch = wood = connotes a degree of strength and basic groundedness. But also birching = flagellation. Also, “John Birch Society,” skeevy and untrustworthy. And it’s a hard, sharp word. There’s a lot about the character that unpacks out of the name.

I'm working with some folks on a product name right now. It's hard. And I think the good ones have dense (and sometimes non-obvious) layers of meaning, just like in fiction.

MMO subscription charts

I'm reading a few books on online gaming, starting with Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds. It's mostly about MMORPGs, or MMOs as we've thankfully started to call them.

I'm about halfway through the book, which was published in 2006, and it's startling how much has changed in a few years. As the book was written, World of Warcraft was just starting to take off -- and the current crop of lightweight social games wasn't even on the horizon.

Castronova spends some time talking about the number of folks spending their time in online worlds, and I wanted to know how those numbers looked now. So I headed over to MMOdata.net, which does a fine job of collecting those stats. (It's worth spending a little time with their MMO and Accuracy list, a nice bit of data collection transparency.)

All the following charts are from MMOdata as of August 3, 2010: the charts are regularly updated.

The first chart is total subscriptions for all MMOs tracked -- a pretty steady curve up, at least until the last 6 months or so.

The next tracks subscriber growth for the top MMOs (those with 1+ million subscribers):

Finally (and I find this the most interesting chart of all), the number of peak concurrent users for the largest shards. Most games control the number of peak users by adding more shards, and so aren't shown -- instead we see the two main worlds with no sharding. In other words, everyone logging on is in the same world at the same time.

Eve Online is an interesting example of slow, steady growth as a relatively minor game world.