Hild, by Nicola Griffith
This book is a weird beast. Set in Britain around the year 600AD, around the time that the
island was converting to Christianity, it follows a woman who would eventually become St.
Hilda of Whitby (no, I don't know who she is either). Hild is a seer from an early age, not
really because she has any mystical powers but more because she's been raised by her mother
to be a highly-trained political operator, surrounded by people who aren't looking much past
their own self-interest. Caught between the Catholic church, Irish war parties, and her own
hostile king, Hild spends much of the book trying to figure out how to keep herself and her
family safe by predicting events before anyone else realizes what's going on.
The elevator pitch for this — Dune if Paul Atreides was a woman in the middle
ages — is so good, it's all the more annoying that Hild herself comes across as
one-dimensional and unrealistic. She's setting policy by the age of ten, and running large
chunks of the country by 16. It's not really a Mary Sue — Hild has plenty of flaws,
and regularly makes mistakes — so much as it's merely undramatic. The narration tends
to tell, rather than show, with little in the way of suspense or surprise. Griffith's goal,
at least in part, seems to be to use Hild as a critique of passive female characters in
fantasy literature, which is a fine goal. It's frustrating that she seems to have forgotten
to make her very interesting in the process.
Precision Journalism, by Philip Meyer
This book is often cited on the NICAR discussion list as the go-to textbook for data
journalists, but I'd never read it. The Kindle version is the 2002 4th edition, which seems
to be the newest copy. As a result, parts of it are dated or a little "quaint," but for the
most part I think it actually holds up to its reputation. Meyer keeps a light touch
throughout the book, walking reporters through standard statistical tests, surveys and
polling, and databases without getting bogged down into too much operational detail. There's
a lot of "here's the formula, and here's where to go to learn more," which seems reasonable.
Inadvertently, being a textbook for an undergraduate audience, Precision Journalism
is revealing as much for what it thinks students won't know as it is for what it explicitly
teaches. For example, there's an early chapter that covers probability, which makes sense:
probability is confusing, and many people get it wrong even after a statistics class. I'm a
little snobbier about the following chapter, in which Meyer details how to figure
percentage change and change in percentage (subtly different concepts). Part of me wants is
glad that it's being covered. Another part is annoyed that students don't know it already.
That said, Meyer's enthusiasm and practical outlook on what we now call "data journalism"
really resonated with me. I'd like to have seen more emphasis on SQL instead of SAS, but
that's nitpicking. For the most part, Precision Journalism does a great job of
covering the strengths and weaknesses of computer-assisted reporting, with lots of examples
and wry humor. I guess there's a reason it's a classic.
Debt, by David Graeber
Everything in Debt is kind of a letdown after its second chapter. That would be
section where Graeber disembowels the common economic myth of a "barter economy" — the
idea that in some mythical village, one person had chickens but wanted shoes, and the other
person had shoes but didn't want chickens, and so to enable them both to trade despite their
conflicting desires, we invented money. How convenient!
Turns out it's also a complete fabrication, despite the efforts of decades of
anthropologists trying to find such a barter society. Instead, the historical record shows
that people in non-money societies are linked by an interwoven network of casual debts and
favors, not strict one-for-one exchanges. We invented money not to supplant barter, but when
we needed a method of exchange that didn't involve trust — usually to give soldiers a
way to pay for things when they camped somewhere, given that they were only temporary
occupiers and not accountable for the same kind of debts as a neighbor.
This is not new research, apparently — Graeber complains that anthropologists have
been trying to convince economists to find a new origin story for years — but it was
new to me. The realization that the foundational mythology of economics is a fairy tale
doesn't disprove its validity as a field, but it does raise a lot of really interesting
questions. Graeber, a former leader within the Occupy movement, certainly pulls no punches
in his criticisms.
The rest of the book is good and similarly thought-provoking, but it can't help but seem a
bit underwhelming. Graeber works his way forward methodically through all the ways that we
conceptualize obligations, then through the history of debt and payment up through the
modern age. At times, this is fascinating, especially when he discusses "reversions" from a
monetary economy to an informal debt economy. Ultimately, the book builds to a theory of
international politics that ties debt to "tribute." Is it convincing? For my part, not
entirely, no. But it's a fascinating and deeply-researched argument.
Halo: Kilo-Five trilogy, by Karen Traviss
Karen Traviss is one of those writers who makes me resent the licensed-property industry a
little bit. A talented genre writer — her Wess'har books are a sharp and
unsettling rumination on politics and veganism — Traviss gets tapped a lot to write
tie-in novels for movies and games. She's good enough that the result sometimes transcends
its origin, so every now and then I'll give one a shot. The Kilo-Five books are basically
what you get if you cross Halo's backstory with a spy yarn.
Set between the third and fourth games, the Kilo Five books bear little resemblance to the
action of the source material. There aren't a lot of firefights on offer: instead, the plot
bears more resemblance to Operation Mincemeat, the WWII
counterintelligence operation that disguised the fact that the Allies had broken Nazi codes.
Having won a war against hostile aliens, the books' human protagonists are working covertly
to keep them destabilized by creating civil unrest and sabotaging infrastructure. It's also
a subversive take on the macho warrior spirit of the Halo franchise, which makes the
Amazon reviews from wounded fans almost
worth the price of admission. I'm still glad Traviss is getting back to original
fiction, though.
Girl Sleuth, by Melanie Rehak
When I was a kid, my dad went to a second-hand bookstore and bought ten or fifteen of the
Tom Swift Jr. pulp novels for me. Even though at that point they were probably thirty years
old, dated with golly-gee-whiz references to the wonders of atomic power (oh, to have lived
in the uncomplicated world before Three Mile Island), I read them cover to cover multiple
times. Tom Swift, of course, was a product of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and its potboiler
formula — the same one that powered the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, neither of which I
read but which I'm sure I would have found equally compelling.
Girl Sleuth is nominally a history of Nancy Drew, but it also serves as a look at the
Stratemeyer dynasty: started by an enterprising writer named Edward Stratemeyer, then
carried on by his daughter Harriet when he passed away. It's also the story of Mildred Wirt,
the woman who wrote almost all the original Nancy Drew, but was for years hidden behind the
syndicate's pen name, Carolyn Keene. Rehak traces the evolution of the character, as well as
the parallel tension between the younger Stratemeyer, who wrote many of the series outlines,
and Wirt, an adventurous newspaper journalist who churned out an unthinkable number of pages
for the series. Both women believed, not without reason, that they were the real author of
Nancy Drew.
As much as anything else, Rehak's re-telling is a fascinating look at the lifecycle of pop
culture. Nancy Drew began as a semi-disreputable pulp sensation: hated by librarians, but a
hot commodity among kids. For whatever reason, the series took off, and was beloved enough
that (like my Tom Swifts) it was passed on to a new generation, who took the old stories and
found new contemporary values in them. In a way, it could be argued that she was as much a
creation of the readers as of either of her "authors." Transformed by the changing youth
culture of the 20th century, Nancy Drew became a proto-feminist icon, then an American
tradition, and is now an article of nostalgia. Rehak seems optimistic that she can adapt
even further, but I wonder if that's not belaboring the point. Sometimes a good story should
just end.