Recent reading
Sep. 27th, 2015 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaGlorious Angels by Justina Robson
This is a 500-page brick which is kind of a mix of SF and fantasy. It has interesting worldbuilding and lots of political intrigue, and you should probably not read it if you're in the mood for something that doesn't require your full attention. The main character is a 40-year-old female engineer/mage who has fraught relationships with her two teenage daughters, but the POV jumps around between a fairly large cast of characters. She lives in a matriarchal empire engaged in a draining border war (obviously this is not a matriarchies-are-peaceful-utopias book), ruled by eight mind-melded Empresses. There's an unusual amount of explicit sex compared to most SF/F, mostly in the service of the worldbuilding. Anyway, this book kept me fully engaged and wondering what would be revealed next, although it didn't reach all the way to my heart, and I'm not sure the overall plot completely worked. Would've been a good book for my fannish bookclub to discuss, actually.
Fackliga fribrytare: episoder från hundra år av svensk syndikalism by Ingemar Sjöö (a history of Swedish syndicalism)
This was great! It's not a comprehensive history, but more a series of episodes starting in about 1900 and going up to modern time. For example, one of them is about the longest lock-out in Swedish history, where the forest companies locked the syndicalist union out in an area of Västerbotten in the north of Sweden. They responded by putting a blockade on bringing in other workers. This started in 1925 and lasted for six and a half years, during which people could barely get along by growing their own food, doing the rare odd job and receiving some solidarity funds. And then after six and a half years of blockade they went to the companies, gave their offer, and the companies folded. Then they set up a rotation to fairly share the available jobs. And then, the blockade-breakers wrote an open letter to the union saying they were sorry. They were forgiven, and apparently there were touching scenes with grown men crying, and everybody joined the union.
(Of course in a couple of decades would come mechanization and rationalization of forestry, and now the forest companies don't actually employ much people for logging--instead, they've outsourced the risk of owning harvesting machines to individual workers who need to have their own sub-contracting companies. But let us not think of that now.)
Anyway. I think this book is a great antidote to my bout of political depression. Also it's interesting to see the intersection of my work with forest issues and my union work.
This is a 500-page brick which is kind of a mix of SF and fantasy. It has interesting worldbuilding and lots of political intrigue, and you should probably not read it if you're in the mood for something that doesn't require your full attention. The main character is a 40-year-old female engineer/mage who has fraught relationships with her two teenage daughters, but the POV jumps around between a fairly large cast of characters. She lives in a matriarchal empire engaged in a draining border war (obviously this is not a matriarchies-are-peaceful-utopias book), ruled by eight mind-melded Empresses. There's an unusual amount of explicit sex compared to most SF/F, mostly in the service of the worldbuilding. Anyway, this book kept me fully engaged and wondering what would be revealed next, although it didn't reach all the way to my heart, and I'm not sure the overall plot completely worked. Would've been a good book for my fannish bookclub to discuss, actually.
Fackliga fribrytare: episoder från hundra år av svensk syndikalism by Ingemar Sjöö (a history of Swedish syndicalism)
This was great! It's not a comprehensive history, but more a series of episodes starting in about 1900 and going up to modern time. For example, one of them is about the longest lock-out in Swedish history, where the forest companies locked the syndicalist union out in an area of Västerbotten in the north of Sweden. They responded by putting a blockade on bringing in other workers. This started in 1925 and lasted for six and a half years, during which people could barely get along by growing their own food, doing the rare odd job and receiving some solidarity funds. And then after six and a half years of blockade they went to the companies, gave their offer, and the companies folded. Then they set up a rotation to fairly share the available jobs. And then, the blockade-breakers wrote an open letter to the union saying they were sorry. They were forgiven, and apparently there were touching scenes with grown men crying, and everybody joined the union.
(Of course in a couple of decades would come mechanization and rationalization of forestry, and now the forest companies don't actually employ much people for logging--instead, they've outsourced the risk of owning harvesting machines to individual workers who need to have their own sub-contracting companies. But let us not think of that now.)
Anyway. I think this book is a great antidote to my bout of political depression. Also it's interesting to see the intersection of my work with forest issues and my union work.
