La Tinaja

The move back to the States and a recent house purchase and move have killed all of my reading aside from the lightest leisure reading. Here’s a clearing of the decks from the last couple of months with the hopes that I’ll be picking up new titles at a slightly quicker rate soon…

Books

• Christian Kracht. Imperium: A Fiction of the South Seas. Translated by Daniel James Bowles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

  Sometimes lightly ironic, sometimes sardonic, this novel loosely based on the life of August Engelhardt and his failed utopia in German New Guinea is an entertaining satire of early 20th century European, and particularly German, enthusiasms for empire and esoterica.

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• Nancy Kress. After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon, 2012.

  A quick, tight novella that weaves three separate timelines in a post-apocalyptic climate change parable.

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• Elin Barnes. Justification for Murder. Darcy Lynch Series, Book 1. Paperless Reads, 2013.

  I’ve been experimenting with Kindle-only self-published and small press genre fiction out of curiosity. The writing here is not the strongest, but things moved forward quickly enough that I stuck with it. I was waiting for the Silicon Valley setting to pay off more than it did.

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• Jonathan D. Spence. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.

  I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus from work-related history reading and have been trying to pick up some readable classics to stay at least minimally engaged. Both a biography of a Ricci and a multi-themed global history connecting Counter-Reformation Europe and China, it’s a beautiful book and one that I will return to with a more critical eye once I get back into proper work.

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• David Locke Hall. CRACK99: The Takedown of a $100 Million Chinese Software Pirate. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.

  This account by a retired Delaware US Attorney of uncovering, luring, and apprehending the Chinese operator of a cracked software service provides an interesting window into the US law enforcement response to software piracy. Unfortunately, the details of how things worked on the other side of the coin are relatively limited and obscured by the author’s tough-guy style. I was expecting analysis of the mechanics of a contraband software operation and got an autohagiography.

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