Book Log 2014 #40: The Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins


So while this is easily the best book of the trilogy - what with the revolution in Panem and its aftermath, it would be hard for it not to be - I still found myself somewhat disappointed with the book. I think what I've found is that the books have all been so focused on Katniss that there's not room for anything else, character or plot line, to develop fully. Everything else feels like a stage set upon which Katniss acts, limiting what could be a much more fulfilling universe. Consider we still know almost nothing about the districts, and what we do see of the capital depicts it a nothing more than another arena for a revolt that doubles as the ultimate Hunger Games.

You also see this in some areas of plot that could be explored more. Katniss is clearly concerned with the propaganda arm of the war, and while that does pop up throughout the book, there's room to explore it more fully. We also hear that there was mutual concern over war because the loss of life could lead to permanent negative population growth. How did that happen? Couldn't Panem institute controlled immigration? Are there still countries from which people could emigrate? Spending a little less time on Katniss would allow for a broader, more interesting universe.

In the end, though, this isn't a bad book, and not even a bad trilogy. It just may not be as adult-friendly as, say, Harry Potter (which is a very high bar where crossover YA fiction is concerned).

Book Log 2014 #39: The Day of Atonement by David Liss

London thief-taker Benjamin Weaver is back, but briefly. Set 20 years after his last appearance, Weaver is the guardian of a young Portuguese boy snuck out of Lisbon after his parents were arrested by the Inquisition. The boy, now going by the Anglicized name Sebastian Foxx, follows in Weaver's footsteps, becoming a thief-taker in his own right.

And once he develops the skills -and the bankroll - that will allow him to return home to avenge the death of his parents and discover the fate of the love of his life, he does so. Young and fueled by a mix of anger and lack of concern for his own well-being, Foxx's plan is to kill the priest who had his parents arrested. But then the plan continues to grow new goals, as Foxx finds new people he needs to help and a few more than he needs to kill. His plan also grows more convoluted as it utilizes English traders working within an organization called The Factory, as well as the priest Foxx intends to kill (Foxx is posing as an English Catholic).

Of course, nothing goes to plan, in large part because Foxx, as sure as he is in his physical abilities and the righteousness of his cause, proves to be a lousy judge of character. The combination of hate and youthful inexperience combine to lead Foxx down the wrong path more than once, adding more immediate needs for atonement to those that were part of the original plan. Things culminate on All Souls Day in 1755, perhaps the most notable date in Lisbon's history.

It's another stupendous outing, with excellent use of the time period and setting, and the development of a character who is worthy of replacing Weaver if we are not to see him as the lead anymore. My only problem is that I read this too soon after release, meaning too long of a wait for the next book with Weaver, or Foxx, or both. Highly recommended unless you've not read the earlier books, in which case you should read those as well.

Book Log 2014 #38: Two Fronts by Harry Turtledove

World War II drags on, with Germany back to fighting a two front war. The Russian front is clearly the more active of the two, while fighting on the Western front has started again, but with a notable lack of intensity (though the British are now able to bomb Germany in daylight, and the Axis seems to be putting on a push in North Africa).

Japan continues to dominate the Pacific, with the US still working towards a credible response to Japanese aggression. The US homefront continues to feel little direct impact from war, at least on a macro scale.

More things happen in the various plot lines of this entry than the previous one, though it still feels like not enough progress has been made with just one book left. Still, there are some suggestions - German political instability and a reference to Oak Ridge - that suggest how the end may come.

Book Log 2014 #37: A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger

Richard II has a tenuous hold on the throne of England, and with all of the usual threats to his rule comes a new one - a book of prophecy purported to have foretold the deaths of the kings of England up to Richard, and one final prophecy for Richard himself.

When the book falls into the hands of a prostitute, the high and low worlds of London become entangled, Those that hold the book may have the key to fortune if they can sell it to the right bidder, but also risk being executed for treason if caught with the book. Into this falls poet and intelligencer John Gower, who is charged with finding the book by Geoffrey Chaucer, a bureaucrat in the king's service.

There's a lot to like about this book, it's a good historical and literary thriller. The jacket intimated that Chaucer would be more involved in the book than he was; Chaucer's appearances are important but the main character really is Gower. Not a huge issue.

Book Log 2014 #36: The Discovery of Middle Earth by Graham Robb

This book should have been right up my alley - using geography and various sources to demonstrate the complexity of Celtic society - but it never quite clicked for me. Spent a good 75 pages trying to get into it but never did. Not sure if I needed to go back and start over or if the book started off too quickly for my level of expertise in pre-Roman France. Either way, if you do pick this up take your time.

Book Log 2014 #35: Everything I Ever Needed to Know About _____* I Learned from Monty Python by Brian Cogan and Jeff Massey

This book seeks to explain the wide variety of serious subjects that Monty Python referenced in its TV show and movies. And there are many, many subjects to cover, not surprising given the Oxbridge background of the Pythons.

The problem is that exhaustive can often be exhausting, and I found that happened pretty quickly. The first major subject tackled is philosophy, and about halfway through covering all of the subtopics I found that I was spending more time thinking about the skits and scenes than the book. So this may be better read as a reference while actually watching Python than read cover to cover.

Book Log 2014 #34: Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie

A young scribe named Peter is recalled from Paris to his native Mainz in order to meet a man with a new way of getting words onto the page - Johann Gutenberg, whose press may revolutionize book making. Peter is then apprenticed to Gutenberg, with mixed emotions about the prospect as it will derail his promising career as a scribe and means leaving Paris for his provincial home.

Peter soon learns he has some talent for printing, and becomes a vital part of the team that will take on Gutenberg's lofty idea - a printed Bible. Producing the book will put Gutenberg's printers in jeopardy, as the city - and the churchmen who control it - have concerns about the new process. So the rush is on to produce and sell the copies before someone puts a stop to them.

All that said, the conflict in the book never quite feels like conflict. It's always looming, but even when a turning point comes, the resulting action is a little flat. That's probably more realistic - amping up the conflict is always better for sales - but it's a little unexpected.

I do recommend the book, as it's well-written and tells the story of Gutenberg's Bible from a unique perspective.

Book Log 2014 #33: American Catch by Paul Greenberg

In this follow-up to the award-winning Four Fish, Greenberg looks at three native species of seafood - New York oysters, Gulf shrimp, and wild Alaskan salmon - to answer the question of why most of the US-caught seafood is exported while most of the US-eaten seafood is imported (and how that arrangement impacts the US economy and environment).

There are a number of reasons why this has happened, from a US dietary shift away from seafood to the profits to be made selling fresh seafood in the Asian market. There's a good argument made for trying to shift the US back to focusing on domestic production and consumption of seafood, though the challenges to doing so are significant.

I liked the book, and need to seek out Four Fish in the future.

Book Log 2014 #32: The Black Country by Alex Grecian

Inspector Walter Day takes his murder-solving skills on the road, as a potential killing in a small coal-mining town in the Midlands leads the locals to call Scotland Yard for help. It's clear from the start that Day and his team - Sergeant Hammersmith, Doctor Kingsley, Kingsley's daughter, and even Day's wife - aren't wanted in the town, with residents actively working against them to protect the town's secrets, even in the face of a likely murder.

I have mixed feelings about setting the second book of the series outside of London. On the one hand, the Midlands setting allows for some very different story telling and plays on the pasts of both Day (originally from Devon, so a return to an area that's not London) and Hammersmith (whose life in the mines as a child was well documented in the first book). On the other hand, I wonder if it's too early to set a book outside of London. The first book set the tone for the newly-formed Murder Squad and the tensions between the squad and the regular police as well as within the squad. The second book could have helped develop that further, adding complexity to the relationships. By moving outside of the city, we don't get that development, which may lead to the third book having to cover old ground to get the reader back up to speed.

But that's a larger concern for the series. As far as this book goes, we do get development in the relationship between Day and his colleagues, and even between Day and his wife (though her appearance in this book is brief and a little confusing). The Midlands setting is very different from London, though the use of a small, backwards town with its own ways and superstitions could be seen as a little cliche. But I enjoyed it overall, and plan to keep up with the series.

Book Log 2014 #31: Coup d'Etat by Harry Turtledove

The War that Came Early continues, and looks like it will continue for some time when a coup changes the leadership in Britain, ending the armistice between Britain and France and Germany. Otherwise, things more or less stay the same in this book. There are some larger changes towards the end (including a cliffhanger for one of them), but otherwise this entry in the series suffers from the same issue as some of the earlier books. Not enough happens - soldiers fight another battle, pilots fly another mission, civilians suffer another indignity - and the war continues. Which may be the point - war being uncaring, cruel, and seemingly without end - but maybe not the most interesting way to demonstrate it.

Book Log 2014 #30: The Seven Wonders by Steven Saylor

Often mentioned, this book recounts the trip that Gordianus the Finder took as a young man to visit the Seven Wonders, a trip taken with his tutor under somewhat unusual circumstances. As you might imagine, at each stop Gordianus manages to get caught up in a local mystery, and uses his developing skills to solve it.

The mysteries aren't that complex - not surprising, as there's a limited number of pages for each - but they're enjoyable nevertheless. They give a fuller picture of how Gordianus came to be the Finder, and the greater forces that led him away from Rome and to Alexandria.

Book Log 2014 #29: Capital Punishment by Robert Wilson

Charles Boxer is a kidnapping consultant, hired by families to help negotiate for the release of their taken loved one. His skills, honed in the Royal Marines, Metropolitan Police, and with a private security firm, make him the perfect choice for those who want to work outside of official channels. He's also the perfect choice for those who want the additional -and illegal - services that Boxer can offer now that he's a freelancer.

When the daughter of an Indian billionaire goes missing, Boxer is hired to help get her back. But there's more to the case than meets the eye, a melding of professional skill and personal intent that leads Boxer into the billionaire's past and his connections with the Pakistani military. Compounding the professional difficulty are personal ones, between a love triangle involving his ex-wife and another woman and a very difficult relationship with their daughter.

I don't think I've read a book by Robert Wilson that I didn't like, and that continues here.

Book Log 2014 #28: The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst

A dangerous game is forming in pre-war Paris, pitting a group of Italians who publish a resistance newspaper against Fascist secret agents who have turned up the violence in the hopes of keeping the paper out of Italy.

In the middle of this struggle is the foreign correspondent of the title, an Italian working in Paris for Reuters. He has to balance his actual job with his increasingly important role with the paper, a role that also draws him into the orbit of the French and British secret services. On top of all of this is his reunion with a former lover, who is now married and involved with a resistance cell in Germany. Can our hero keep the resistance newspaper running and save the woman he loves?

Furst again tells a compelling story of people who, out of the spotlight, put their personal and professional lives on the line to fight fascism. He's got a formula, and it works really well.

As I mentioned in my last post, the USOC's selection criteria for determining which bid to put forward don't specifically mention two things: venues and cost. So how do the four bids stack up in those areas?

Boston, as I also mentioned, has put forward a "walkable" Games, with most venues within 3.5 miles of the city center. The only event I've seen mentioned as being held outside of Boston is rowing, which is reportedly going up to Lowell to be held on the Merrimack River (the Charles being too twisty and bridge-covered). Still not sure this is the best way to go, but I do think there's a certain logic to a dense Olympics that could allow spectators to walk between venues rather than rely on public transport for all trips.

There's a real focus on using existing venues, and on making any new venues temporary (or in some cases, convertible to office/retail/residential space). The big question is where an Olympic stadium will go. I tended to think the site of Suffolk Downs would make sense - it's on Route 1A and the Blue Line - but there's more talk now about the site of the New Boston Food Market. It's located right next to the Southeast Expressway and rail lines from South Station, which seems ideal (though the Expressway traffic is always problematic), but to get the parcel the city would likely need to take it by eminent domain. Warm up your lawyers.

As far as costs go, $7.5 billion gets bandied about quite a bit, but depending on how you count things it could go as high as $20 billion. A fairer number is probably somewhere in the middle - for now - as the high estimate includes projects in a $13 billion transportation bill that will happen regardless of how the Olympics go.

Washington has a more spread out plan if these map views are anything to go by, though it's more compact than earlier plans that saw venues spread out from Baltimore to Richmond. It looks like there will be more new building in this plan than in Boston's, unsure if the Olympic Stadium plan would renovate or raze RFK Stadium. The Olympic Village is also slated to go in an area whose most notable facility is apparently a homeless shelter. Not sure how well that will go over.

I didn't find a lot of cost projections, but it looks like they're aiming at a similar operating budget to Boston and what was spent in London. It's the additional costs that can cause the budget to bloat, which is especially concerning for Washington given that much of their governance is done by Congress rather than local officials. Good luck squeezing an extra billion out of a House committee chaired by some guy from Idaho.

Los Angeles will put the LA Coliseum back to use as their Olympic Stadium, which makes sense. Venues will be placed into four clusters, two in what I consider LA proper, one in Carson, and one in Long Beach. A walkable Games this is not, though organizers have a stated goal of having 80 percent of spectators get to venues by public transportation. It's not clear to me how many new venues are needed, but many of the ones listed in a venue map (that may have come out prematurely) seem to already exist.

Same story on costs as with the other bids, and I'm finding no estimates of costs beyond the operating budget. Given the emphasis on extending a couple of transit lines, I'm thinking the costs here may be significant.

San Francisco also seems to be taking more of a regional approach, looking at using existing facilities in San Jose, Santa Clara and Berkeley. There's also a potential $2 billion stadium deal for Oakland that could be included, but there are apparently significant challenges to that project as well. There's also talk of a temporary Olympic stadium like Boston's, and using existing venues or building temporary ones in the city (beach volleyball in front of city hall, for example).

Costs - should I even bother? Just like everyone else, as far as we know.

 It's probably a fool's errand to try to compare these bids at this stage, when so much is unknown. But from what is out there, I do think the Boston bid is the most walkable, and perhaps the one that does the best job of using existing venues (or of not talking about what will need to be built, temporary or not). It also appears to be the bid that's the most up-front about costs outside of the operating budget, for better or worse (living in the Boston area may also may be making more aware of Boston's details). I'm most concerned over Washington's bid, between the specter of Congressional involvement and the likely backlash of clearing out the homeless to build an athlete's village.

The Boston bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics was officially submitted to the US Olympics Committee yesterday. And while details are sparse as to contents of the bid, the Boston committee's website does list six selection criteria that the USOC will use to compare the Boston bid to those of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington DC. Those criteria?

45,000 hotel rooms - organizers claim Boston clears this minimum, but the city's tourism bureau claims 30,000-plus. The chairman of the organizing committee claims the 45,000 are in Boston proper, and that 5,000 more rooms will be added to Boston's total from hotels under construction now.

An Olympic village that sleeps 16,500 and has a 5,000 person dining hall - talk is that this will be located on the UMass Boston-Bayside Expo Center parcel, which makes me wonder how athletes and the like will get from there to venues given the usual horrific traffic on the Southeast Expressway (more on how that might work later).

Also worth noting that the UMass-Boston master plan from 2009 (warning: large PDF!) only mentions 2,000 bed spaces. At 16,500 beds, the village could house the entire undergraduate population of the school with room to spare.

Operations space for over 15,000 media and broadcasters - I have no idea where this would go, and what talk there's been about the bid doesn't mention this. I'm guessing some mix of existing and new office space will cover this.

An international airport that can handle thousands of international travelers per day - Logan's international flights mostly come from Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe. This past October Logan saw just over 420,000 international passengers. So while the volume may not be a problem, the lack of direct flights from most of the world is a concern (though one that other hosts have likely encountered).

The biggest problem may be getting people from Logan to sites around the city, which leads us to the next criterion...

Public transportation services to venues, roadway closures to allow exclusive use for Games-related transportation - this is the topic of the most importance to Bostonians, as transportation infrastructure is already strained and may not be able to handle the additional load the Olympics would bring. The bid proposes to make the Games walkable, with most venues in or near the city center.

The road closures are perhaps more problematic, as traffic in Boston on a good day is challenging. Taking away a lane from the major thoroughfares (as happened in London with its Olympic lanes) is feasible but could completely screw up what little order there is in driving in the city currently.

A workforce of up to 200,000 - a potential drawback given our reasonably rosy employment numbers, but a number that could be reached by employing a large number of retirees and students. Students may well form the backbone of this workforce, as the timing and temporary nature of the Games does lend itself to be an ultimate summer job. Whether or not these are paid or volunteer positions is kind of an open question, though I did run across some talk of using international students as free interpreters.

There's no talk among these criteria about venues or cost, but from what's come out the Boston bid will lean on existing college facilities quite a bit, which helps with the walkable theme and keeps costs down. This is also where the use of college students as volunteers or low-cost workers is implied.

Where cost is concerned, the estimated costs seems to be in the $7.5 billion range. The money seems to be 60 percent revenues (tickets, broadcasts and international sponsorships) and 40 percent other sponsorships (local biotech firms are mentioned in this context quite a bit, not sure why they'd pony up over $3 billion for this). The organizers swear up and down that no public funds will be used outside of infrastructure improvements. Considering the federal government just pledged $1 billion for a Green Line extension that will cover less than half of the total cost, you can see where this might go.

Without more specifics it's hard to tell if this bid is really feasible, or how it measures up against the other bids. But at this point, the Boston bid seems to at least meet the minimum requirements.