Trail of Lightning is urban fantasy with a Navajo twist. I'll be the first to admit that urban fantasy is not my genre, and while I appreciated something more creative than 'what if vampires and faeries, and they're at war?', something about this book didn't quite come together for me.

Maggie Hoskie is an emotionally damaged badass who hunts monsters, and is afraid that she is becoming a monster herself. She's got a tangled mentorship-romantic relationship with Neizghani, a powerful immortal monster-slayer from Diné legend. She's also got a new partner, a handsome medicine man with usual powers who's Too Charming and untrustworthy while also being super nice and handsome. People eating monsters are popping up across Diné territory, and Maggie has to track down the source while dealing with her feelings, a long list of enemies in authority, and the sudden appearance of Coyote, who has a quest. If you know anything about Coyote, that is very bad.

The setting is both really evocative, but also kinda nonsensical. It's been ten years since the Big Water, a cataclysmic event that wiped out most of the coastal cities and ended the Fifth World (what we live in now, according to the Navajo). Diné lands were protected by a sacred wall, which has turned into a 50' solid barrier of materials matching the cardinal directions. There are other polities; the remains of Albuquerque are run by water barons, and Mormons finally built their Zion, but the setting is distinctly post-apocalyptic. And yet the rez is still the rez, with canned beans and fry bread, crooked cops, and bootleg whiskey. The setting both wants to be grounded in the real world, and also be a place where Diné are manifesting supernatural abilities, divine figures show up, and the USA is a shattered wreck. I get this is urban fantasy and not hard scifi, but Roanhorse should commit more to the weirdness of Dinétah!

The other thing that didn't work is the nature of evil, and this plays a key role in the story and how it ends. Neizghani's perspective is that evil is a metaphysical reality, like a disease, and that it is contagious. You can catch evil from being near evil. Maggie's close encounter with a witch who killed her grandmother rendered her partially corrupted, possibly a threat. But Neizghani is a supernatural being who doesn't see life the same way that we do. Maybe evil is the harm that we do to others, when we deceive and use them, when we take them from the families with violence. Or maybe evil is something else, a thing out of balance? Rereading the ending, I think it's the second, humanist option, but I sort of wish it were something else.

There's a five star book in here, but I think it's encumbered by the urban fantasy tropes. Roanhorse has enough talent to recognize the tropes as bad, but she uses them rather than subverting them. A different reader may be delighted.

The Electric Church is noir flavored scifi. Avery Cates is a gun-for-hire in a grim future. Earth has been unified under an oppressive government called the System, and the vast majority of people squat in the ruins of once great cities, committing petty crimes, living fast, and dying young. At 27, Cates is an old veteran. People over 50 are basically mythical. Cates gets drawn in a plot by the head of Internal Affairs for the System Cops to assassinate the head of a new religion called the Electric Church. The Electric Church preaches a doctrine of salvation through cybernetization, machine immortality to contemplate their sins. At their rate of growth, they'll be the biggest religion in 5 years, and the only religion in 10, if they aren't stopped.

The story moves quickly through the standard noir beats, with the coolest scifi ideas compressed into the last few chapters. My main problem is that the writing is repetitive, and commits the cardinal sin of telling and not showing. Cates's first person monologue is the only voice of the book, and he drones on about how ordinary cops are bad and the elite System Security Force are worse, how creepy the Electric Church cyborg Monks are, how crapsack the world is, and how much of tough and smart criminal he is. All words better spent showing this, rather than telling us.

It's not the notes that you play. It's the notes that you don't play that make the song. Empress is a stunning little puzzle box of a story. A cleric-historian named Chih visits a lake-side villa that has been declassified, removed from a sorcerous veil that blocked all interaction for decades. There she finds an elderly lady, Rabbit, once handmaiden to the titular Empress. The narrative plays out as Rabbit tells her memories, each prompted by an object found in the villa.

The story fragments are about a royalty, married into a foreign land and then cast aside once her husband's dynastic and diplomatic need are met. It's about two women from opposite ends of society, and their unlikely love. And it is about subterfuge, rebellion, and victory. Each page is a gem. And the setting, while inspired by Southeast Asia, floats on fantastic heights. I love the cruel northern mammoth cavalry of the Empress, the strange red glow of the lake, the way a broken-hearted person can become a kingfisher.

Vo draws immediate comparison to Aliette de Bodard, but this story impressed me far more. Read it.

Expecting Better is a data-driven approach towards pregnancy. Oster is a economist at Brown, specializing in health issues in the developing world. When she got pregnant, she turned her research skills on pregnancy, trying to determine the validity of conventional wisdom.

The results are a solid gloss of meta-analyses. Oster knows her way around a search engine and knows how to read a paper. But she's not an OB, nor any kind of medical doctor. In practical terms, it's more credible than your friend on Facebook, but in epistemic terms, there's a real difference between a professional and someone with Google Scholar, no matter how careful they are. Some of the recommendations are surprisingly commonsense. Listeria is awful, but rarely associated with cold cuts, so sandwiches are probably fine. Some are calculated to offend everybody. Drinking during pregnancy is fine, short of actual binge drinking and clinical alcoholism. Home births have higher risks than hospital births, though it's hard to tell in America because home births are done by wealthy white women who have pretty good outcomes in general. And doctors are too quick to induce labor, and too quick to go to C-sections when continual monitoring shows a dip in fetal vitals, rather than knowing that labor is hard for everyone involved.

There some good stuff here, and the basic thrust that you need to pick your risk tolerances and then follow the evidence, even when there isn't a gold standard randomized clinical trial, is a solid viewpoint. But this book is very much a product of a specific type of person (white, educated, economics, Ivy League), and doubles down on one of the worst attributes of that type of person by assuming those lessons are universal.

I was feeling in the mood for some popcorn, and my local library has a whole shelf of Lawrence Block books, so I decided to start the first Matthew Scudder book. It's okay, a more subtle character study and a nice period piece, but not more beyond that.

Scudder is an alcoholic ex-cop, a product of an NYPD where if someone puts money in your hand you take and you don't ask questions. He's not a private detective, because they have licenses and rules, but if you give him a gift he might ask questions for you. The father of a murdered girl wants answers about his estranged daughter, and her relationship with the young man who killed her and committed suicide in his jail cell.

The best parts are Scudder's weird personal code of morality. He's an atheist who tithes, a corrupt man with unimpeachable honestly. His journey takes him from gay bars to suburbs. I enjoyed the investigative techniques of calling people at central archives and badgering them to get you information. The ostensible case doesn't hang together, and it's a matter of the psychology of the participants rather than any evidence. If there's any flaw in the writing, it's that the culprit can be identified as a matter of pacing rather than pondering. (We need to have at least one false lead, maybe two, which means that the true killer should should up at 28% of the story, plus or minus. Try this on police procedural TV, it works great!).

Block is obviously a solid workman as a writer, but I think I like the Bernie Rhodenbarr books better.

Winged Victory is a novel about fighter pilots in the First World War, written by a surviving pilot. The odds against pilots were grim, life expectancy measured in weeks. This is not about glory, for war in the air is bloody murder rather than chivalric duels, but there's a certain grandeur in flight.

Yeats has two themes, communicated through his narrator Tom Cundall. The first is the sublime joy of flight in these primitive, first practical aeroplanes. There is an immense pleasure in playing among the clouds, contour chasing over Flanders Fields, throwing his Sopwith Camel around the sky and running at brass hats British staff cars.

But this is still war, and there are Huns, little black dots in the sky that alternate scamper away from Cundalls' flight, or come slashing down in diving attacks when they have superiority of position and numbers. There's Archie, mostly ineffective bursts of early flak, there's faulty engines and bad landings, and the hated fearful work of ground attacks, a deadly game of roulette on every patrol. The second theme is the declining state of Cundall's nerves, as the stress of months of war against the odds grinds him down, and seeking momentary pleasures in alcohol, wardroom banter, and French mademoiselles. Reading this is, appropriately enough, also exhausting. The book drones on about the other pilots, their mayfly lives, the stupidity of the war, the repetitive carousing, and says nothing.

Part of this might be time and cultural distance. I've read a lot of similar books about young Americans in Vietnam in the 1060s, and there the brief allusions are enough to work. English culture of the 1910s alien enough the allusions simply don't connect. Though I was glad to see their version of 'Ok Boomer' is 'Victorian sentimentality', the more things change etc. There's a really good 200 page book in here. Unfortunately my copy is twice that length. I can recognize Winged Victory as important without much liking it.

Printer's Error is pretty much exactly what it says on the cover, a series of interesting anecdotes about the printing business. The stories go from Gutenberg to mass market booksales in the 1920s, and are about legacies of rare books today and the weirdness of the publishing business. The figures alternate between the mainstream, Gutenberg and his nemesis the anti-printing monk Johannes Trithemius, Benjamin Franklin's creation of an American publishing empire, and advertising genius Edward Bernays, who made books cool to own. And some figures are more marginal-genius poet, engraver, and mystic William Blake, or T. J. Cobden-Sanderson of the 'Beautiful Books' movement, and his destruction of the famous 'Dove font'.

The stories are interesting, but the writing style is atrocious. I don't watch Pawn Stars, so I don't know how much of this is Romney's voice, and if it works on TV, but every line has a joke, and the jokes bomb harder than the 8th Air Force. It's just groaner after groaner after groaner, like a third-tier Cracked.com article. There's a decent book in here, but it's buried under the textual equivalent of Miracle Whip. Gross.

It's a Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery, so you know what's up, with gentleman thieving and some light murder. Bernie has a new girlfriend, an Eastern European beauty named Ilona who's into Humphrey Bogart films. Bernie is hired to steal a portfolio of documents from an apartment, and when he partner winds up dead, well, maybe he's been watching too many movies, but you have to avenge your partner.

The plot involves a Balkan micronation, old CIA operations, rare stamps, and lost royal heirs. Bernie stumbles through an unlikely series of coincidences to arrive at his version of justice. It's kinda contrived, kinda dumb, and some fun light reading.

Admiral Nimitz is famously attributed to have said that everything the US Navy experienced during the Second World War, with the exception of kamikaze attacks, had already been experienced in table top exercises at the Naval War College. The war games of the 20s and 30s are a subject that deserves serious study. One could approach the war games as elements of professionalizing the officer corps during peace time, or approach them as instruments of futurism to handle rapid advances in naval aviation. They're also interesting as the progenitors of modern war games and military futurism, as explained in Perla's The Art of Wargaming. This style of serious wargaming also seems unique American, at least compared to the other major naval powers of Japan and Britain*. There's a lot of meat in the subject, worthy of a good book. Sadly, it is not this one.

Winning a Future War commits two major errors, it's disorganized and repetitive. Histories can be oriented either chronologically or thematically, or at best both. This book manages to confuse the details of how a culture of wargaming was inculcated at the Naval War College, and the people involved. Interwar military bureaucratic infighting is hardly riveting stuff, but it's hard to piece out who in naval leadership picked wargaming, and how they sustained it as a central curriculum element against what surely must have been a skeptical Washington establishment.

Two major thrusts make interwar naval development particularly interesting. First is the rapid advance of technology, particularly naval aviation. The second were the political limits powers operated under due to the Washington and London Naval Treaties, and a desire to maintain naval parity while avoiding an unaffordable arms race. Naval war games had interesting mixed roles here. They showed that armored 10,000 light cruisers armed with 6" guns were superior to similar ships armed with 8" guns, and an equivalent tonnage of 6,000 ton 6" cruisers. The flight deck cruiser was revealed to be a poor compromise of guns ship and aircraft carrier. Seaplanes and seaplane tenders were heavily overweighted in gaming analyses, compared to their actual role in battle. Though seaplanes served vital scout, anti-submarine, and search and rescue roles, they were dead meat in a stand up fight.

Wargames revealed that ability to launch and recover planes quickly was the key determinant in aircraft carrier effectiveness, and suggested lightly built flight decks that could be easily repaired as compared to armored structure. American carriers were better handled than the British equivalents, but it took painful months to match the effectiveness of the razor-sharp Kido Butai. Perhaps the most import strategic revelation was that the Philippines could not be adequate defended or reinforced without taking Pacific Islands first. The direct 'ticket to Manila' strategy would give Japan good odds of inflicting enough attrition en route to decisively defeat the US in the Western Pacific. Army Chief of Staff MacArthur signed plans that would doom his future command to a ignoble surrender based on Navy wargames. And it's fascinating that the games managed to teach useful lessons about naval aviation, despite being full of elaborate guesses about air and ship combat that were wrong on almost every particular.

But the interesting bits are buried under a trudge of bad writing, even for an academic history. Some odd editing choices in the Kindle version are another blow, even if the pictures of ships are always appreciated. This book doesn't really get at the games themselves, or the culture of serious games.

*Famously, Yamamoto's staff gamed out the Battle of Midway. What happened was the Japanese carriers were ambushed from the northeast and took several disabling bomb hits. Yamamoto fudged the dice hits and refloated his ships. And then the battle played out a lot like the wargame, except that the Japanese carriers were sunk for real.

Skunk Works is one of those phrases which sets aviation fans' hearts a-flutter. The secretive engineering team from Burbank was responsible for some of the most incredible planes of all times. The SR-71 was built in the 1960s, and it remains the highest flying, fastest plane in aviation. It's a marvel of engineering built with slide rules.

Ben Rich, the second director of the Skunk Works, writes a fun account of his views on aviation, engineering, and procurement politics. The Skunk Works was an elite brotherhood devoted towards the best in aviation, with rules to minimize management bullshit and keep every engineer within a stone's throw of the production floor. Rich discusses in detail his work on the F-117 stealth fighter, the U-2, and the SR-71, with dips into Navy stealth boats ("never work for the Navy, they don't know what they want and they'll break your heart"), and the red tape of military bureaucracy.

Kelly Johnson stories are another major theme of the book. I've no doubt that Ben Rich is a great engineer, but Johnson, the founder of the Skunk Works, was a legend who won two Collier Trophies and could estimate an aviation problem to 95% accuracy that'd take hours of calculation to prove. Johnson was a genius, but his abrasive personality alienated Air Force generals, who hated a man who built the best planes for the CIA and castigated their procurement efforts as fuck-ups that'd kill pilots and lose wars. The book is lived up by 'other perspective sections', with pilots describing what flying these planes was like, and five or six Secretaries of Defense talking about how vital the planes were to US national security.

Rich also tries to get at the culture of engineering excellence that defined the Skunk Works. As someone with a sideline in organizational studies, this is really hard. How do you know your asshole leader is a real genius and not a cargo-culting lunatic (see Musk, Elon)? It's a difficult challenge, and one not quite clear aside from 'get good people, give them hard but specific goals, and get the hell out their way', but Rich tries. I just wonder what he'd think of Lockheed's latest stealth wonder-blunder, the F-35...