War

Posted on June 17, 2025 by smellincoffee

War  takes us into the Biden White House and its foreign policy challenges.    Biden had no shortage of  heavy issues coming into office amid a pandemic,  but the changing global scene would create far more.   Woodward’s narrative sews together a multitude of conversations between Biden, his officers,  and their counterparts in Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and so on, but lacks what I would expect from someone with Woodward’s name cachet:  independent analysis and original content. 

While the outbreak of the Russo-Ukraine war takes center stage,  Trump is always on the sidelines – or yelling through the back curtain. Trump, to his credit, signed orders to withdraw the US military from Afghanistan by May 2021: Biden, to his credit, honored that treaty and finally ended the Forever War.  Woodward doesn’t dwell on this much at all, which disappointed my hopes of learning if the withdrawal debacle owed to a lack of planning during the Trump administration,  or poor planning and execution during the Biden administration.  Instead,  the gathering storm clouds over the Russo-Ukrainian border soon attract all attention. Although the Biden White House urged Zelensky to take the Russian threat seriously,   the  TV-politician turned real-politician ignored them, and was soon in the fight of his  life.  Biden was adamant about not repeating the mistake of his predecessors and thrusting American troops into harm’s way across the globe. (Unmentioned is the fact that war with Russia, a nuclear power and formerly the heart of a global empire, is rather different than war with  desert warlords.)   Woodward’s account has Biden trying to support Ukraine as much as possible without  triggering Putin into drastic action,  as well as defending Israel while at the same time trying to restrain Bibi from doing something crazy like nuking Gaza or bombing Tehran.  The narratives of both of these are frequently interrupted by Woodward quickly panning the camera to Trump, usually saying something outrageous: only one time does this have relevance to the  story, when Trump is essentially controlling the Republican legislative response to a Biden proposal in Congress.  As the book starts winding down, Woodward looks at Biden’s flagging energy and mental readiness, and salutes him as someone who bowed to the facts rather than brushed them off.  The book is written not just as a history of Biden’s foreign policy, but a condemnation of Trump in general, complete with a half-page dedicated to denouncing him with no connection to the narrative at all. 

Given Woodward’s reputation, I was wholly underwhelmed by this title and wonder if his other volumes are similar – a coasting on his reputation achieved from the Nixon days.  As far as the content presented goes, it’s fine:   Woodward knows how to write, and I liked getting to “witness” these conversations between statesmen and officials as they try to find the best response in the crisis at hand, though given the lack of footnotes I’m hesitant to trust those elements that were not public statements and the like.   Biden comes off as level-headed and pragmatic, except when he’s vigorously swearing at Putin and Bibi.   What’s missing on Woodward’s part is any criticism:  he simply relates what he’s told, and doesn’t push back or dig in to anything.  We’re told that there had been conflict in Ukraine since 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea: why did he do that? Was there something like a coup that directly threatened Russia’s legal assets in Crimea?     He dismisses the claims of neo-Nazism in Ukraine on the grounds that Zelensky is Jewish,   as if that makes the Azov battalion and the Right Sector nonexistent. This isn’t journalism, it’s just  parrotry.  I liked the inside-the-keyhole look, but Woodward does not impress.  I can see reading some of his earlier works, though, to see if this quality is consistent or just the sign of an aging author phoning it in a la John Grisham.

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews, World Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Top Ten Summer To-Reads

Posted on June 17, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s treble T is our summer booklists, which prompts me to first take a look back at my spring list. Boy, did I not do well: to borrow from baseball, I only hit .400. (Actually, in baseball that would be terrific batting average.) Of the spring list, I read Star Trek: Asylum, Real England, Ty Cobb, and “more CJ Box”. Boy, did I read more CJ Box!

Today’s tease:

Biden had cut short his family vacation in Nantucket to plead his case to Obama directly. “Listen to me, boss,” Biden said. “Maybe I’ve been around this town for too long, but one thing I know is when these generals are trying to box in a new president.” He leaned in toward Obama and stage-whispered, “Don’t let them jam you.” (Bob Woodward, WAR.)

(1) One of Us: Nixon and the American Dream. I’ve never read a biography of Nixon before, and bought this when I was in a mood. Unfortunately, it happened to be the victim of flying coffee violence while in my car, but I think my physical copy is still readable.

(2) Chernobyl’s Wild Kingdom: Life Inside the Dead Zone. A look at how nature has responded and changed to the absence of human and presence of radioactive activity around Chernobyl.

(3) War, Bob Woodward. A history of the Biden presidency’s attempts to manage DC’s response to the Russo-Ukrainian war, and mideast bloodbaths from the Afghan pullout to the Hamas obscenity and the resulting invasion of Gaza. This one is in progress, and will be my second Woodward: I know I read Fear in October 2018 but it doesn’t appear on the blog, not even in a short-round. I’m 70% of the way through this one, so it’s a bit of a lock-in.

(4) Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, Trita Parsi. I’ve owned this on Kindle for a while but have yet to read it: given that a hot war has broken out, it seems time to finally take it on. I’ve read Parsi before, in Losing an Enemy.

(5) Star Trek Strange New Worlds: Toward the Light, James Swallow. Another Strange New Worlds title to keep me from withdrawal until season 3 begins airing in July….

(6) Back of Beyond, CJ Box. He has a smaller non-Pickett series that I might look into.

(7) Content, Cory Doctorow. A collection of essays on copyright, intellectual property, etc. This is a pet topic of Doctorow’s, one he has explored in both essays and fiction.

(8) The House Divided. This is just one to finish: it’s about the origins of the first Congressional baseball game.

(9) The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, Richard Dawkins. I’m looking forward to this one because the premise sounds a bit like Ghosts of Evolution: he’s looking at the way various creatures’ phenotypes testify to the environment that molded them, even when they’ve been displaced from that environment by ecological changes and so on. (Ghosts remains one of my favorite science books, ever, examining broken ecological relationships — like trees that produce food for giant ground sloths who are no longer there to eat them.)

(10) The British are Coming — maybe ? I usually do an American revolution nod in late June or early July, but it’s a big ol’ book.

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Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore

Posted on June 16, 2025 by smellincoffee

Clay is the newest hire at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, occupying the clerk’s desk through the midnight hours and trying not to go out of his mind with boredom. He is there not because he has a passion for books, but because the bagel company he once managed ads and the website for has folded, and he’s out of job. The bookstore is a strange place: it stocks the books Mr. Penumbra thinks should be available to the public, not necessarily books the public wants to buy. There’s no shortage of ancient Greek plays, for instance, but popular biographies are nowhere to be found. Stranger still, the “bookstore” has a special section that works more as a lending library to a small clique of eccentrics, people who come in in the middle of the night a-quivering with anticipation and insist they need (insert arcane-sounding title here). And the books themselves are indecipherable, at least to Clay: they’re in some kind of code. Having nothing else to do during these long nights, Clay begins creating a digital model of the library with color-coded paths to represent each of the people in the strange club, trying to figure out if there’s meaning in the books they choose. Startlingly, a pattern emerges. After hooking up with a data-viz engineer from Google and uploading past circulation data to its servers, the pattern becomes even more obvious, and opens the door to Clay learning about, of all things, a cult of book-readers devoted to decrypting a tome by a late-medieval font designer. This was an odd, if enjoyable enough story. The initial premise is certainly a good hook, but once Clay starts digging in and realizing what it’s all about, the potential magic-realism element evaporates and we realize, yeah, these people are just nutty. An unexpected enjoyable element for me was the Google nostalgia: this was written and published back when Google was still “cool”: think The Internship-level Google worship. These days, of course, Google is a bit more like Sauron and his All-Seeing Eye, but as someone who grew up with Google and misses those days of optimism, it was kinda nice to revisit them.

Kat’s eyes light up: “A natural language corpus! I’ve been looking for an excuse to use the book scanner.” She grins and slaps the table. “Bring it to Google. We have a machine for this. You have to bring it to Google.” She’s bouncing in her seat a little, and her lips make a pretty shape when she says the word corpus.

I sense an incompatibility between Kat’s belief in a disembodied human future and her insistence on alcohol consumption, but I let it slide, because I’m going to a party.

“You have Gerritszoon,” I cluck, “suitable for emails, book reports, and résumés. This”—I point to the blown-up NARRATIO on my laptop screen—“is Gerritszoon Display, suitable for billboards, magazine spreads, and, apparently, occult book covers. See, it has pointier serifs.” Mat nods gravely. “The serifs are pointy indeed.”

“Besides,” I say, “I’m the rogue in this scenario.” Kat raises an eyebrow and I explain quietly, “He’s the warrior, you’re the wizard, I’m the rogue. This conversation never happened.”


“We’re going to take a picture of every surface, from every angle, under bright, even light.” He pauses. “So we can re-create it.” My mouth hangs open. He continues, “I’ve done photo recon on castles and mansions. This store is tiny. It’ll only take three or four thousand shots.” Mat’s intention is completely over-the-top, obsessive, and maybe impossible. In other words: it’s perfect for this place. “So, where’s the camera?” I ask.

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Saturday Shorts — This Long Vigil

Posted on June 14, 2025 by smellincoffee

Amid the deep, cold black of space, the generation ship Hermes cruises her way toward finding a new home for humanity at Tau Ceti. Or, at least the thousand souls who are aboard her. Unusually, though, these are not the same thousand who left Earth centuries ago. Humanity figured out hibernation, but not cryogenics: its sleeping souls will age and die just as their predecessors on Earth did. A complex system of robotics and AI aboard the ship monitors the occupants and maintains the “stock”, recycling those who reach 70 and replacing them with newborns created artificially from the genes of the occupants.

But one of Hermes occupants is different: the Monitor, a person selected in their young adult days to serve as the ship’s hands, to do the work its robotic systems cannot quite manage. Orion is the sixth monitor of the Hermes’ life, having been effectively raised by “Dan”, the ship’s artificial intelligence: it was that intelligence that taught him to read, that educated him about the Hermes and its mission, of Earth-that-was’s fate. He has never felt a human touch other than his own, never heard another voice that was not the computer’s. And now, as he nears the age of 50, it is time for Orion to choose a successor and return to his own sleeping pod, where he knows in 20 years hence that same successor will supervised his own recycling — clearing the tube up for another newborn. And he….really doesn’t want to go.

This Long Vigil is an interesting spin on the ‘generation ship’ trope, one that places an extraordinary psychological burden on its protagonist: not only are they tasked with helping dispose of old crewmembers, but when they chose their successor they do so knowing it’s the last thing they will ever do, as Monitor or anything else: Orion will retire to his pod and sleep for twenty years until his own life is terminated. This was powerful emotional drama for me, but one that was sabotaged to a degree by the strange setup aboard the Hermes. What on Earth-that-was will happen when the Hermes arrives? How will Dan and the successor-monitor turn 999 “babies” of differing ages into a human population fit to take over a world? Yes, they have all the world’s knowledge in their databanks, including art and song, but….there’s no “culture”, so to speak, no experience coping with emotions — no maturity born of trial and adversity, no character to these people. It’s a profoundly unsettling premise. Despite that, though, I couldn’t help but sympathize with Orion, especially in his yearning for human touch and desire to live and not merely exist and serve.

This is the first of what may become a series, of short story reviews. Seems a fun way to end the week on, and I might use it to spotlight indie fiction or even fan fiction.

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SHELLI: MurderMind

Posted on June 13, 2025 by smellincoffee
Cases with Shelli were always . . . different.

One of my favorite reads of 2024 was SHELLI, a SF mystery featuring a pair of detectives — one human, one synthetic — who investigated crimes relating to sythentic lifeforms, i.e. androids. Jake and Shelli are back in MurderMind, but their old department has been shuttered. Shelli, now in an illegal organic-hybrid body, has withdrawn from human society in favor of sheltering and rehabilitating synthetics marked for destruction. There’s conspiracy afoot, though — synthetics are increasingly malfunctioning with lethal consequences, and higher ups think only Shelli can get to the bottom of it. So, following a little blackmail, she and Jake are back at the job, investigating a mystery that blooms much larger an more dangerous than they could have imagined. Murder Mind is a mix of mystery, action, and moral quandries as Jake and Shelli both wrestle with the meaning of synthetic life and their responsibility towards it — and humanity.

The drama here begins with the personal: Shelli and Jake have a connection that neither of them acknowledge, and perhaps aren’t even aware of consciously, and that connection makes Jake’s unwitting participation in Shelli’s blackmail especially hurtful. After they realize there’s a connection to their last case, though, Shelli’s discomfort at being used and Jake’s on unease about his complicity give way to the mission. The stakes, as we find out, are high. In this nearish-future SF, synthetics are incorporated into human society at every level: synths serve as nannies, guards, tech. This string of ‘malfunctions’ is the harbinger of something far, far more serious, and the pursuit of answers takes the pair on a cross-country trip, into secret synth sanctuaries and the operations centers of beings who blur the line between human and machine. The action really rises towards the end: I could see this being dramatized. Beyond that action, though, the story keeps bringing up moral questions: what makes something alive? What makes a person and person? Fittingly, the story swings back to the personal again, as the Shelli-Jake dynamic and choices made because of it complicate the plot. The goodreads entry for this title indicates it’s part of a longer series, and I’m looking forward to more.

SHELLI: MurderMind will be released on June 19th.

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1984 (Dramatization)

Posted on June 12, 2025 by smellincoffee

Earlier in the year I re-read 1984, along with Cyberkitten, and when I spotted this full-cast adaptation of the classic dystopia on Audible. I knew I had to try it, if only to hear Tom Hardy’s Big Brother. The adaptation follows the story of 1984, and uses its dialogue, but doesn’t have Orwell’s narrative voice, and some parts that wouldn’t adapt well (like the readings from Goldstein’s book) are omitted or reworked. In addition to large vocal cast, there are audio effects and a score. We hear floorboards squeak, prisoners screaming profanity in the background, and so on. This is used to good effect, immersing the reader more into the story, but given the content it can also be disturbing — especially the screaming in pain and desperate thought criminals pleading for their lives, speaking through tears. The music also adds to the experience, though sometimes the choices are curious: I rather like synthwave, but it was unexpected, especially after the very passionate rebellious-sex-in-a-field scene. Boy, was I glad I wasn’t going through a drive-through while listening to that one.

I commented in my February review that every time I read 1984, or in this case ‘experience’ it, something new leaps out at me. In this case, the voice acting spotlit how degraded the denizens of Airstrip One truly are by the Party. They’re pathetic, wretched — parroting slogans they don’t believe in, policing their thoughts, spitting venom at those they’re instructed to. Hearing horrible children berate their parents — who were terrified of being accused of thoughtcrime by the little brainwashed brutes — was outright grating. This made the scenes where Winston was among proles far more salient, because the proles act like human beings, not free-range prisoners. They sound normal, not cringy, and it’s a relief to be around them. The torture scenes, though, were not pleasant going between the crying, screaming, bones cracking, and the mercurial voice of O’Brien, who could be seductive one second and turn authoritarian in the blink of an eye. An all-around interesting experience: I’d say it’s a plusgood way to spend three hours, but not doubleplusgood.

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Favorite season

Posted on June 11, 2025 by smellincoffee
Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite season of year? Why?
View all responses

This one is interesting because my answer has changed over the years. At one point it would’ve been fall because “SUMMER IS OVER!”. However, the oldeer I get the more I realize Fall is increasingly “NATURE WANTS YOU DEAD” season. I live in an area of the country that’s vulnerable to both tornadoes and hurricanes, and we get both in the fall . Also, it’s so hot and humid that we don’t get Winter reliably until Jan-Feb, though in recent years we’ve been surprised. We don’t get really get fall: there’s a period where it’s hot and humid and miserable and oh, are the leaves changing OH CRAP RUN FOR THE STORM SHELTER. So, while in my youth I lightly despised Spring because it meant summer was on the way, the older I get the more I like it. I suppose it’s the whole new-life thing. It helps that March-April is one of the best times to visit my area of the country, if you catch us between tornadoes. (April is peak tornado and peak flower season in my hometown.) The weather is not awful and good lord do we have beautiful flowers to admire.

So, seasons in Alabama:
Spring: It’s cold! Hot! Pretty! Tornadoes! Hot! Pretty! Cold! Pretty! Tornados!
Summer: Heat. Humidity. Awfultude. But, weather is not trying to kill you directly, only indirectly. It smother-hugs you to despair.
Fall: Heat. Humidity. Not as much as summer but it also has tornadoes and hurricanes.
Winter: Heat. Humidity. Extreme cold. Tornadoes. Sometimes hurricanes. Sometimes ice-storms. Sometimes floods. You want to know how to dress for Christmas? Bless your whole heart.

It’s a nice place to live when nature is not trying to murder you, though.

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WWW Wednesday & Favorite Things to Do in Summer

Posted on June 11, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Black Badge #3: Ace in in the Hole, and SHELLI: MurderMind. Reviews for both pending. Actually, I’m writing this in advance so Ace in the Hole may have posted already.

“Killing me won’t solve anything,” [—] said, floating just out
of reach.“I can’t kill what’s already dead,” she replied. “You’re not [———].”
“No, I am so much more.”
“And so much less.” (SHELLI: MurderMind)

WHAT are you reading now? I was reading One of Us, a 700 page biography of Nixon, but then I spilled coffee on it. Zut alors! Here’s the Kindle shelf:

I’m technically halfway through The House Divided, which is more boring than any baseball book involving congresscritters has a right to be. I’ve read Desert Solitaire before, obviously: it was the gateway book into Ed Abbey for me, and the reason I went to New Mexico in 2016.

WHAT are you reading next?

What, is this your first time here?

So! Favorite things to do in summer!

(1 -10) I live in Alabama. We stay inside and pay homage to the air-conditioner. 100+ temps, 100% humidity, twice-daily showers. Summertime is the great sticky siege, and once it’s over it’s hurricane and tornado season.

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Black Badge: Ace in the Hole

Posted on June 10, 2025 by smellincoffee
“You look like Hell reborn if I’m being honest.”
“You ain’t far off on that count.”

“I ain’t changed. I’m still a bad man.”
“Maybe your path isn’t changing, Arthur…but I know you will face your destiny like a man. Like a warrior. Because that’s what you are.”
“That’s all I am. A fighter. A killer. A crazy man.”
“So be it. But in the time you have left….don’t compromise., and you’ll do everything you have to do…..just fine. Fight! And keep fighting. Be true to yourself, Mister Morgan. Leave the lies and hypocrisy to fools like me.”

For untold years, the thought-dead gunslinger James Crowley has roamed the wild west doing the bidding of the White Throne – hunting wretched nephilim that prey on humans and subvert creation, like vampires. This was his reward for dying in virtue despite a life mired in vice.  Love of a woman and his own conscience, though, have made him an apparent enemy of the Throne:    he rescued someone that the forces of evil and “good” both desired to make a weapon for their respective forces.  Doing what was right in their own hearts didn’t work for the Hebrews, and it’s made Crowley a target for other Black Badges like himself.  A vampiric talisman is keeping him concealed for the moment, but  given the amount of  supernatural interest in Rosa,   the imperiled couple will be found, and by all the hounds of hell and horsemen of the apocalypse.   So begins the unpredictable but grimly satisfying end to the Black Badge series.

Vein Pursuits truly stood the Black Badge series on its head,  as it took us not only out of the west, but into ‘civilization’  – New Orleans,  where depravity and demonic energy reign.  Crowley’s stubbornness has often put him at odds with the messenger of the White Throne who was his handler – Shar – but    in Vein Pursuits his contempt for the cruelty that Shar often ignored saw him fall from what passed for grace in his life.   As if to confirm that Shar – and possibly the White Throne – were not  truly righteous, they have resurrected the murdering rapist who killed Crowley and made of him a Black Badge.    How could “good” use such a vile creature as Ace, who makes use of necromancy and enlists werewolves as allies?  Ace in the Hole  is the drama of Crowley,  Rosa, and his aging horse Timp attempting to evade or destroy the legions sent after him and the monster driving them.  But now they’ll go worse than the Big Easy: they’re going to the Federal City itself, the beast on the Potomac.

Ace in the Hole takes into some strange,  fantastic, and arcane territory. What is Rosa that angels, demons, and vampires are all fixated on her?  As Crowley and Rosa flee,  the severity of their dilemma grows more obvious, and there are some fantastic “horror” elements, including monsters that seem plucked straight from Lovecraft.   Although working for the White Throne, Ace is consorting with arcane powers of darkness, doing things like possessing a trainload of passengers to attack Crowley as they search for answers and sanctuary:  what’s more, Ace’s diabolical powers allow him to overwhelm those who have energies of their own, like a servant of the Traitor, Father of Vampires. This means that not only is Crowley habitually robbed of allies,  but deceit and treachery sit as thick in the plot as a London fog.   He’s left with questions and desperation, and so is the reader: what does God need with a mere woman?  

This book is all kinds of interesting from theological, mythological, and even historical points of view. The action culminates  within – or rather, below – the Washington monument,  in which we learn that many of the Traitor’s scions were involved in the founding of America, and their vision brings  to mind the Freemasons – especially for historically literate readers who know which founders were Masons.  I thought this was fascinating, especially given that the Catholic Church views Freemasonry with condemnation,  regarding it almost as anathema.  That element is never directly addressed, but readers who are cued in will find much of interest. 

Ace in the Hole is an ending to the trilogy, though offers a graphic novel series for those who can’t get enough. I might count myself in this category: Bruno and Castle’s world-building captured me from the word go, with its interesting blind of Christian and southwestern native cosmotology.   Of course, being a fan of RDR2 I am an utter sucker for the outlaw with a heart of gold, even when he ain’t voiced by Oirthur Morgan hisself.  Overall, I definitely enjoyed the book, but it’s definitely not a read-along: a reader has to be invested in both Crowley and the Crowley-Rosa relationship that’s been building for years, to get the most out of it. I’m sad that this is the end of the line — it’s a new world, and they don’t want folk like us no more — but it was a great series while it lasted, with a fun mix of western action and fantasy that ranged from light to epic.

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Top Ten “Bookish Wishes”

Posted on June 10, 2025 by smellincoffee

Today’s theme is supposed to be about our book wishlists — i.e. books we want to buy or receive — but I’m going to play with the theme a bit. Recently the ladyfriend and I were trapped in a bookstore by heavy rains (the horrors!), and I passed the time by coveting books, and taking pictures of those I wanted to read up on reviews for. (There’s a reason my average review score on goodreads is high: I’m fairly picky about books I commit to/buy.) But first, teases!

Ace raised a knife to the bottom of the great werewolf’s jaw, the tip steaming as silver poked through flesh. “Thinkin’s a bad look on you.”

The untouched country is where the greatest horrors lurk. Things that’ve been here since God spoke those famous words and created Heaven and Earth, or so it goes. Monsters that even most monsters fear. You see, there’s a reason that, so high up in these mountains, where ghosts won’t haunt—werewolves don’t even hunt. (Ace in the Hole, Rhett C. Bruno & Jaime Castle)

So, I’m going to share some books I ogled!

The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions — science history, something I haven’t hit in a while!

Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure, on the potential uses of poop.

Giants of the Lost World. The cover puzzles me: it appears to be referring to South American megafauna, which makes me think of the giant ground sloth, not dinos.

Earthly Materials, on the science of our body’s..emissions.

Land Between the Rivers, a history of Iraq.

Welcome to Pawnee, stories about Parks and Recreation.

Source Code, a cleverly titled autobiography of Bill Gates. Another cute title in this section was Character Limit, a history of Elon Musk and twitter.

How Infrastructure Works, a revisit to a favorite topic.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe. I mostly looked at this one for the cover.

Psuedo Science. Always interesting to learn about conspiracy theories and the like, at least when I’m not having to “learn” about them by someone ranting to me at work where I have to smile blandly.

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