Max Gladstone came out with his latest book in the Craft Wars sequence, Dead Country. It was a while since I read the Craft Sequence, and Dead Country has one of my favorite heroines, Tara Abernathy, so I went back to the beginning and reread his first book in the series. I loved the book when I first read it, and I loved it even more when I reread it this year.
This book is a brilliant sendup of finance masquerading as fantasy. In the book, there are numerous gods all competing for faith (a form of fungible currency that can be traded.) The book compares priests of gods to modern-day bankers, brings in insurance adjustment, fractional banking, forward trading, and bankruptcy proceedings in a fantasy world, and ties them all together into a murder mystery: who murdered a god?
Brilliant, inventive, and great fun. It is possible to read the entire series in one go, and each takes a different aspect of finance. Reminds me of Terry Pratchett at his finest. Though my own book is non-fiction, Max Gladstone’s inventiveness is an inspiration in my own work.
Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence chronicles the epic struggle to build a just society in a modern fantasy world.
A god has died, and it's up to Tara, first-year associate in the international necromantic firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, to bring Him back to life before His city falls apart.
Her client is Kos, recently deceased fire god of the city of Alt Coulumb. Without Him, the metropolis's steam generators will shut down, its trains will cease running, and its four million citizens will riot.
Tara's job: resurrect Kos before chaos sets in. Her…
I read a lot of apocalyptic science fiction, but this is a scarily well-written apocalyptic fact. Jeff writes about a terrifyingly relevant topic today: the heating of the planet.
This is something most of us do not understand at a visceral level. Jeff does a brilliant job using anecdotes, statistics, and just plain great storytelling to describe what happens to humanity in a world where temperatures are inexorably climbing. It is like a punch in the gut and puts the story of a “frog in a slowly boiling pot” into a whole new context.
I have personally changed a lot of my habits after reading this book and have tried to even implement as many heat mitigation strategies in my school as I can.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times A Next Big Idea Book Club Selection The New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
Jeff Goodell's "masterful, bracing" (David Wallace-Wells) investigation exposes "through stellar reporting, artful storytelling and fascinating scientific explanations" (Naomi Klein) an explosive new understanding of heat and the impact that rising temperatures will have on our lives and on our planet. "Entertaining and thoroughly researched," (Al Gore), it will completely change the way you see the world, and despite its urgent themes, is injected…
I am somewhat cheating here because this book is the first part of a duology (the second book is their He Who Drowned the World), so they are best read together.
Shelly Parker-Chan’s debut novel describes the rise of the Ming dynasty in China, including all the historical characters and major conflicts. Keeping most of the history in place, they reimagine the first Ming emperor as a woman masquerading as a man and writes about all the intrigues and battles that bring her to power.
The books are dark, and part two is even darker than part one. But both are absolutely riveting.
This is an irreverent description of the big ideas of finance. People think of finance as a complicated topic and are intimidated by the numbers. But the entirety of finance can also be thought of as a set of six basic ideas that form an integrated whole. Five of these six ideas have won Nobel prizes in economics.
In this book, I explain why these ideas won Nobel prizes, why these ideas triggered paradigm shifts in the way we think about finance, how each idea depends on the next, and how they all fit together to explain how finance works. The publishers were very afraid that my jokes would fall flat for a finance textbook, so I was forced to sneak them into the footnotes.
