Getting a Lot of Reading Done - Oops!

Tearing through a few books lately. I've had more time to read, due to having had a fairly serious bike wreck on Thursday October 21. Biking the Legacy Trail with my wife, I got distracted where the trail crosses the main entrance to the Kentucky Horse Park and ran into 1 of the 3' tall steel posts in the middle of the trail (car discourager) going around 15 mph. Main point of contact was about 4" above the knee on my right inner thigh. Bruising the entire length of the leg, plus a 8" diameter bruise on my left lower back, which I suspect is where I hit the ground. Various pulled muscles in my back and groin, very little road rash. I have pix but I will not engage in injury porn.

8 days later, I am still limping around, with a knot the size and shape of 1/2 a pear in my right thigh, and trying as much as possible to keep off of the leg and keep it elevated. I suspect it will be weeks if not months before I am fully recovered.

I have been saying for years that I would know it was time to quit biking when I had a serious wreck. I would follow that with, "That's not a good algorithm, I clearly need to replace it." Too late, the algorithm has fired. Time to quit biking.

I've greatly enjoyed biking, both in Florida and especially in the beautiful rolling (or nasty steep and long) hills of the horse country around Lexington. Since I retired in 2012, I have biked most Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. My app says that since 2013 I have biked 16,039 miles, an average of 1,782 miles/year. It looks like 2020 was my peak year, 2,447 miles, probably because I spent 9 months of 2020 in Florida.

But, at my age (70), I can't afford to be laid up for weeks, gaining weight and losing muscle mass. Plus, this was a bad wreck, and I'm lucky I didn't break anything. I'm not going to press that luck.

I'll keep walking Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday - although that was problematic for a while. March 4 I was 4.5 miles into a 5.7 mile walk when I got a sharp pain in the arch of my right foot. I had to lay off of it 6 weeks before I could start walking again. But, I now have arch support insoles in all my shoes, including the slippers I wear around the house all the time now - no more going barefoot, my southern heritage is officially betrayed - and I do many more stretches of my feet and ankles, particularly before I get out of bed in the morning. So hopefully I'm cleared to walk.

Maybe on my old biking days I'll add some weight work to my floor work. Hopefully I will feel safe using a gym soon.

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The reading has been all good. 1st, Charles Stross, "Invisible Sun", 2021, 544 pages, 148k words. This is the 3rd and final book of the Empire Games series, and the 6th and FINAL book of The Merchant Princes extended series. Stross does his usual great job. Lots of interesting politics here. A fitting completion for these books, I gave it 5 stars, unusual.

Between this series and The Laundry Files, so much of Charlie's bandwidth has been eaten up over the last 2 decades or so. He is the only author extant where I have repeatedly had the thought, "I wish Charlie had a clone or 2.", such that he could do more of the other speculative narratives of his non-series novels, or other new ideas he has mentioned.

2nd, Adrian Tchaikovsky, "Shards of Earth", 2021, 524 pages, 142k words. Apparently #1 in The Final Architecture series. Mr. T is becoming my fav space opera author. Lots of flavors of aliens, some approaching god-like status, lots of flavors of humans, lots of plot, lots of action. Very enjoyable.

3rd & lastly, Benjamin Rosenbaum, "The Unraveling", 2021, 384 pages, 104k words. I think Cory Doctorow strongly recommended this book in his most excellent Pluralistic blog. I found it a little offputting at 1st. 1st off, it is set 550,000 years in the future. I'm sorry, that is way too far. Anything that far in the future involving humans had better be happening in at least 27 dimensions. I would put the tech in this book at a few 1000 years in the future, tops. Or maybe a few decades, if somehow The Singularity actually appears?

2ndly, I finally did figure out the gendering situation: 2 genders, Staids, who are emotionally repressed scholars of some infinitely long book, and Vails, who are more normal people who like the 3 Fs: fashion, fighting, and fucking. It kind of reminded me of 2 of 7 of Ada Palmer's hives: the Staids as Masons, and the Vails as Humanists. Where are the other 5 hives?

It also reminded me of the theistic Buddhist states, like Tibet say. Real people generating capital, theistic leaches at the top sucking it off.

The book's metadata points out Rosenbaum's apparent engagement with his Judaism. So maybe we see the Staids as Talmudic scholars ... boring.

The story then winds up being a Romeo & Juliet story - a forbidden Staid-Vail romance, shocking! Then we get an inequality based revolution, civilization overturned, dogs sleeping with cats, where will it end? Note that, although their civilization is designed to minimize economic inequality, the inequality they have is at the most basic level of humankind: who gets to reproduce, and who decides? I think that I have mentioned before, the right to reproduce w/o anyone's permission is the most basic and primitive of all human rights. Hence 2x kudos to the Chinese, who actually successfully curtailed the reproduction rights of their population. (But now their demographics are inverting, trouble ahead, oops!)

Overall, it was engaging towards the end. But, our Romeo & Juliet are 1st introduced to us at 9YO, then for most of the action of the book at 16YO. So, is this then a YA novel? The book does not appear to be much targeted at a YA audience. I was thinking, teenagers as protagonists === YA book.

Maybe not? After a bit of consideration, I'd say this book was hackneyed & predictable, but, still mostly an enjoyable read.

1st Batch of 2021 Music In

OK, I'm going to create this list as I upload these to my PC. Then I'll come back and rate and comment after I've listened to them a bit.

• Juana Molina, "ANRMAL", 2020, 11 tracks, Bandcamp. This was from late 2020 and got missed somehow. A full album of Argentinian punk. Really fun to listen to, a good variety of tunes. It seems to be a live album, it's so great that you can hardly tell anymore. Wow, looking her up on Wikipedia, she's 60 YO, 2nd generation show biz, been recording for 20 years. 4 stars. Here's "Eras". Hah, she's playing a cherry SG open-handed - FTW!

• Jorge Elbrecht, "Presentable Corpse 002", 2021, 12 tracks, Bandcamp. This is lot more poppy than some of his other albums - so I like it better. Still, 3 stars.
• Market, "2", 2021, 3 tracks, Bandcamp. From Melbourne, Oz. Very laid back, very chill, very dreamy. 4 stars. Here's "Show it".

• First Word Records, "Two Syllables Volume Seventeen", 2021, 16 tracks, Bandcamp. A sampler of their artists, and a good one - I got 2 new artists from it. I really like when record labels do these. My oldest daughter gave me 1 from Luaka Bop decades ago that opened a lot of doors for me. This one does too. 4 stars, but no video, I'll add for some of the individual artists.
• Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass, "Take Love Easy", 1973, 9 tracks. The 1st of 4 albums these 2 did together. I was really looking forward to this, but Ella's voice is not what it was in the 20s-50s. So sad, she is my favorite vocalist of all time, so I am being more critical than I am of many other aging artists. But in her prime, her voice, her timbre, were just magical. It's a good collaboration though. 4 stars. I almost went with 3, but, it's Ella. Here's "A Foggy Day".

• Joe Pass, "Virtuoso", 1974, 12 tracks. At 1st, I was overwhelmed by this. "Too many notes." But as I got used to it, I found it very enjoyable. 4 stars. Here's "Cherokee". Fast enough?

• Takuya Kuroda, "Fly Moon Die Soon", 2020, 9 tracks, Bandcamp. This comes from the First Word Records sampler. He is a jazz trumpeter with a great band and great tunes. I've often complained about jazz that it is too abstract and not hooky enough. None of that here, great tunes. A lot of the 2 bar, 8 beat pattern (the clave?) so dominant in international music. 4 stars. Here's the song from the collaboration, "Do No Why".

• Roxy Music, eponymous, 1972, 10 tracks. Someone insisted this was a classic I had to check out. I did. I had no idea this was Brian Eno's 1st band. Overall, it didn't do much for me. 3 stars.
• The Beths, "Future Me Hates Me", 2018, 10 tracks, Bandcamp. From Auckland, New Zealand. I liked their 2020 "Jump Rope Gazers". This 1 is good too. Nice energetic tunes. 4 stars. Here's the 1st track "Great No One".

This brings us up to 2021-01-12.

It's Not As Bad As I Thought

I've already said "Music In is a mess" too many times. I'm finally getting around to processing this. Again, the problem is integrating the music I download on my MacBook when I'm in Florida into my permanent collection on my desktop PC in Kentucky.

It looks like I have 8 albums added in Lexington from Sep to Nov of last year in _Unrated on the PC. So I will process those 1st.

Then, it looks like there are 30 albums on the MacBook to be moved to the PC and processed. I've listened to these I think a lot more than the ones on the PC - those I've been looping on for the last 2-3 weeks. So 38 albums total to process. Not too bad - my November 30 makeup post after spending March-September of last year in Florida processed 41 albums. So I've got a few less than that to process.

Rather than do a huge 41 album post again, I think I'll process these 6-10 at a time. Maybe based on when added to my collection? I can get the date for Amazon purchases, not sure if I can on BandCamp. Ahh, I can use the file creation dates on the MacBook.

So 1st the 8 already on the pc. Then the next post, the next 6 or so from Florida.

I've also gotten behind on checking out the new stuff recommended by bandcamp. I have emails going back to early July. I think I'll get to those as I get more caught up on the stuff I've already purchased.

[Updated 2021-10-10 I wrote that and made this list 2021-09-03. Just now getting back to it. I've definitely been putting it off. I decided, no new novels until this is done, and the 1st group of albums are uploaded to the pc.]

• Redeyes, "Selfportraits LP", 2020, 20 tracks, Bandcamp. Nice French (Toulouse) techno tracks. Very listenable. 4 stars. Here's "Selfportaits: The Movie" on YouTube. Nice!

• William Tyler, "New Veritas", 2020, 7 tracks, Bandcamp. Very ethereal alternative guitar rock. Pleasant listening, but nothing very memorable. And, of course, I think it could use vocals. 3 stars.
• Fleet Foxes, "Shore", 2020, 15 tracks. Their 4th album. I really feel like the power folk bands struggle to maintain a sound once they are successful with it. These guys seem to have stuck with their heavy reverb engineering. Some of these songs are inventive and strong, so I am going for 4 stars for the 1st time since their 1st album (eponymous). Here's "Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman" - not very folky, more Sufjan Stephens or even Grizzly Bear:

• Wendy Eisenberg, "Auto", 2020, 13 tracks, Bandcamp. Very pleasant quirky alternative music. Nice vocals. 4 stars. This track, "futures", had the most videos.

• Cribaby, "love songs for everyone", 2020, 5 tracks, Bandcamp. These are fabulously chill r&b female singer tracks, all totally great. 4 stars. Here's "some kinda voodoo": https://criibaby.bandcamp.com/track/some-kinda-voodoo
• Half Moon Run, "The Covideo Sessions", 2020, 11 tracks, Bandcamp. High energy neo-folkrock. In the same wheelhouse as the Jayhawks maybe. 4 stars. Here's "full circle":

• Andrew Bird, "Hark!", 2020, 13 tracks, Bandcamp. As a rule, I don't buy xmas albums. I have everything Aimee Mann has ever recorded, but I did not buy her xmas album. When I did #SongOfTheDay for 100 straight days, it included 14 straight days of holiday music, 2020-12-20 thru 2021-01-01. I mostly go for 4 stars for Andrew, but, he did 3 small pandemic albums. Those were 4*, so I've heard them probably enough. So I think I'll go with 3 stars.
• Gorillaz, "Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez", 2020, 17 tracks. As always a good effort by Gorillaz. Quite the all-star cast of collaborators, including Elton John. 4 stars. Here's "Désolé ft. Fatoumata Diawara (Episode Two)".

OK. _unrated is empty. I will fill it up, and create the outline in the next Music In post as I go. Everything is clumped together as to date, I'll try to tease some date info out. Onward!

Both Pretty Good

I've been reading at a pretty good clip. A trilogy and a duology.

1st up, "The Age of Madness" trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. I enjoyed his 1st 2 trilogies. This story is set in the same world as the 1st trilogy, "The First Law", 20-40 years later. Some of the characters were around for the 1st trilogy. The 3 books:

1. "A Little Hatred", 2019, 683 pages, 186k words.
2. "The Trouble with Peace", 2020, 739 pages, 201k words.
3. "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2021, 733 pages, 199k words.

So what we have here is a 2,155 page book. There are 9 sections in the book, 3/volume, and the numbering spans the 3 volumes.

I like his writing. Humanly fallable characters. Lots of action. Great plot twists, all tied up nicely in the end.

Funny that the message of the book is so timely. Shakespeare was wrong when he wrote "First, we kill all the lawyers.". He should have said, "First, we kill all the bankers." Seems to me like a jubilee would be a lot easier.

2nd, I reread, for the 3rd or 4th time, "Songs of Earth and Power", by Greg Bear. The complete duology, only $2.99 on Kobo! What an entertainment bargain! The 2 component volumes are:

1. "The Infinity Concerto", 1984, 472 pages, 128k words.
2. "The Serpent Mage", 1986, 430 pages, 117k words.

I've always loved this series. A 17 YO young man is transported to The Realm - of Fairie - to be trained as a mage by Sidhi-human half-breeds (Breeds). It is a compelling story, well paced. I think this should be labeled YA - part of the plot concerns our young male protagonist having his 1st clueless encounters with women - a YA speciality.

I have complained before about theism in Bear's work. I will complain again. In both books the progagonist is in a tight spot and he prays to a very Jehovah-seeming God - despite the revelations in the book that all of earth's gods were Sidhi doing magic tricks to mislead and hold back human development. Sad that such a great mostly sci-fi author - this was his only fantasy until recently - should have his brain infested by theism.

I always loved this one quote from the very end. I think I have used the last line before, this time I'll include the whole thing. A nice humanistic toast:

“To all of us, of all races, and the matter we are made of, and the ground beneath our feet, and the worlds over our head. To strife and passage and death and life.” He held his glass higher. “To horror, and awe, and all strong emotions, and most of all, to love.”