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.