Review: The Winter Long, by Seanan McGuire

This is the eighth book in the October Daye series and leans heavily on the alliances, friendship, world-building, and series backstory. This is not the sort of series that can be meaningfully started in the middle. And, for the same reason, it's also rather hard to review without spoilers, although I'll give it a shot.

Toby has had reason to fear Simon Torquill for the entire series. Everything that's happened to her was set off by him turning her into a fish and destroying her life. She's already had to deal with his partner (in Late Eclipses), so it's not a total surprise that he would show up again. But Toby certainly didn't expect him to show up at her house, or to sound weirdly unlike an enemy, or to reference a geas and an employer. She had never understood his motives, but there may be more to them than simple evil.

I have essentially struck out trying to recommend this series to other people. I think everyone else who's started it has bounced off of it for various reasons: unimpressed by Toby's ability to figure things out, feeling the bits borrowed from the mystery genre are badly done, not liking Irish folklore transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area, or just finding it too dark. I certainly can't argue with people's personal preferences, but I want to, since this remains my favorite urban fantasy series and I want to talk about it with more people. Thankfully, the friends who started reading it independent of my recommendation all love it too. (Perhaps I'm cursing it somehow?)

Regardless, this is more of exactly what I like about this series, which was never the private detective bits (that have now been discarded entirely) and was always the maneuverings and dominance games of faerie politics, the comfort and solid foundation of Toby's chosen family, Toby's full-throttle-forward approach to forcing her way through problems, and the lovely layered world-building. There is so much going on in McGuire's faerie realm, so many hidden secrets, old grudges, lost history, and complex family relationships. I can see some of the shape of problems that the series will eventually resolve, but I still have no guesses as to how McGuire will resolve them.

The Winter Long takes another deep look at some of Toby's oldest relationships, including revisiting some events from Rosemary and Rue (the first book of the series) in a new light. It also keeps, and further deepens, my favorite relationships in this series: Tybalt, Mags and the Library (introduced in the previous book), and of course the Luidaeg, who is my favorite character in the entire series and the one I root for the most.

I've been trying to pinpoint what I like so much about this series, particularly given the number of people who disagree, and I think it's that Toby gets along with, and respects, a wide variety of difficult people, and brings to every interaction a consistent set of internal ethics and priorities. McGuire sets this against a backdrop of court politics, ancient rivalries and agreements, and hidden races with contempt for humans; Toby's role in that world is to stubbornly do the right thing based mostly on gut feeling and personal loyalty. It's not particularly complex ethics; most of the challenges she faces are eventually resolved by finding the right person to kick (or, more frequently now, use her slowly-growing power against) and the right place to kick them.

That simplicity is what I like. This is my comfort reading. Toby looks at tricky court intrigues, bull-headedly does the right thing, and manages to make that work out, which for me (particularly in this political climate) is escapism in the best sense. She has generally good judgment in her friends, those friends stand by her, and the good guys win. Sometimes that's just what I want in a series, particularly when it comes with an impressive range of mythological creations, an interesting and slowly-developing power set, enjoyable character banter, and a ton of world-building mysteries that I want to know more about.

Long story short, this is more of Toby and friends in much the same vein as the last few books in the series. It adds new depth to some past events, moves Toby higher into the upper echelons of faerie politics, and contains many of my favorite characters. Oh, and, for once, Toby isn't sick or injured or drugged for most of the story, which I found a welcome relief.

If you've read this far into the series, I think you'll love it. I certainly did.

Followed by A Red-Rose Chain.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Linked, by Albert-László Barabási

Barabási at the time of this writing was a professor of physics at Notre Dame University (he's now the director of Northeastern University's Center of Complex Networks). Linked is a popularization of his research into scale-free networks, their relationship to power-law distributions (such as the distribution of wealth), and a proposed model explaining why so many interconnected systems in nature and human society appear to form scale-free networks. Based on some quick Wikipedia research, it's worth mentioning that the ubiquity of scale-free networks has been questioned and may not be as strong as Barabási claims here, not that you would know about that controversy from this book.

I've had this book sitting in my to-read pile for (checks records) ten years, so I only vaguely remember why I bought it originally, but I think it was recommended as a more scientific look at phenomenon popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. It isn't that, exactly; Barabási is much less interested in how ideas spread than he is in network structure and its implications for robustness and propagation through the network. (Contagion, as in virus outbreaks, is the obvious example of the latter.)

There are basically two parts to this book: a history of Barabási's research into scale-free networks and the development of the Barabási-Albert model for scale-free network generation, and then Barabási's attempt to find scale-free networks in everything under the sun and make grandiose claims about the implications of that structure for human understanding. One of these parts is better than the other.

The basic definition of a scale-free network is a network where the degree of the nodes (the number of edges coming into or out of the node) follows a power-law distribution. It's a bit hard to describe a power-law distribution without the math, but the intuitive idea is that the distribution will contain a few "winners" who will have orders of magnitude more connections than the average node, to the point that their connections may dominate the graph. This is very unlike a normal distribution (the familiar bell-shaped curve), where most nodes will cluster around a typical number of connections and the number of nodes with a given count of connections will drop off rapidly in either direction from that peak. A typical example of a power-law distribution outside of networks is personal wealth: rather than clustering around some typical values the way natural measurements like physical height do, a few people (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett) have orders of magnitude more wealth than the average person and a noticeable fraction of all wealth in society.

I am moderately dubious of Barabási's assertion here that most prior analysis of networks before his scale-free work focused on random networks (ones where new nodes are connected at an existing node chosen at random), since this is manifestly not the case in computer science (my personal field). However, scale-free networks are a real phenomenon that have some very interesting properties, and Barabási and Albert's proposal of how they might form (add nodes one at a time, and prefer to attach a new node to the existing node with the most connections) is a simple and compelling model of how they can form. Barabási also discusses a later variation, which Wikipedia names the Bianconi-Barabási model, which adds a fitness function for more complex preferential attachment.

Linked covers the history of the idea from Barabási's perspective, as well as a few of its fascinating properties. One is that scale-free networks may not have a tipping point in the Gladwell sense. Depending on the details, there may not be a lower limit of nodes that have to adopt some new property for it to spread through the network. Another is robustness: scale-free networks are startlingly robust against removal of random nodes from the network, requiring removal of large percentages of the nodes before the network fragments, but are quite vulnerable to a more targeted attack that focuses on removing the hubs (the nodes with substantially more connections than average). Scale-free networks also naturally give rise to "six degrees of separation" effects between any two nodes, since the concentration of connections at hubs lead to short paths.

These parts of Linked were fairly interesting, if sometimes clunky. Unfortunately, Barabási doesn't have enough material to talk about mathematical properties and concrete implications at book length, and instead wanders off into an exercise in finding scale-free networks everywhere (cell metabolism, social networks, epidemics, terrorism), and leaping from that assertion (which Wikipedia, at least, labels as not necessarily backed up by later analysis) to some rather overblown claims. I think my favorite was the confident assertion that by 2020 we will be receiving custom-tailored medicine designed specifically for the biological networks of our unique cells, which, one, clearly isn't going to happen, and two, has a strained and dubious connection to scale-free network theory to say the least. There's more in that vein. (That said, the unexpected mathematical connection between the state transition of a Bose-Einstein condensate and scale-free network collapse given sufficiently strong attachment preference and permission to move connections was at least entertaining.)

The general introduction to scale-free networks was interesting and worth reading, but I think the core ideas of this book could have been compressed into a more concise article (and probably have, somewhere on the Internet). The rest of it was mostly boring, punctuated by the occasional eye-roll. I appreciate Barabási's enthusiasm for his topic — it reminds me of professors I worked with at Stanford and their enthusiasm for their pet theoretical concept — but this may be one reason to have the popularization written by someone else. Not really recommended as a book, but if you really want a (somewhat dated) introduction to scale-free networks, you could do worse.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis

One of the foundations of Michael Lewis's mastery of long-form journalism is that he is an incredible storyteller. Given even dry topics of interest (baseball statistics, bond trading, football offensive lines), he has an uncanny knack for finding memorable characters around which to tell a story, and uses their involvement as the backbone of a clear explanation of complex processes or situations. That's why one of the surprises of The Blind Side is that Lewis loses control of his material.

The story that Lewis wants to tell is the development of the left tackle position in professional football. The left tackle is the player on the outside of the offensive line on the blind side of a right-handed quarterback. The advent of the west-coast offense with its emphasis on passing plays, and the corresponding development of aggressive pass rushers in the era of Lawrence Taylor, transformed that position from just another member of the most anonymous group of people in football into one of the most highly-paid positions on the field. The left tackle is the person most responsible for stopping a pass rush.

Lewis does tell that story in The Blind Side, but every time he diverts into it, the reader is left tapping their foot in frustration and wishing he'd hurry up. That's because the other topic of this book, the biographical through line, is Michael Oher, and Michael Oher the person is so much more interesting than anything Lewis has to say about football that the football parts seem wasted.

I'm not sure how many people will manage to read this book without having the details of Oher's story spoiled for them first, particularly given there's also a movie based on this book, but I managed it and loved the unfolding of the story. I'm therefore going to leave out most of the specifics to avoid spoilers. But the short version is that Oher was a sometimes-homeless, neglected black kid with incredible physical skills but almost no interaction with the public school system who ended up being adopted as a teenager by a wealthy white family. They help him clear the hurdles required to play NCAA football.

That's just the bare outline. It's an amazing story, and Lewis tells it very well. I had a hard time putting this book down, and rushed through the background chapters on the evolution of football to get back to more details about Oher. But, as much as Lewis tries to make this book a biography of Oher himself, it's really not. As Lewis discloses at the end of this edition, he's a personal friend of Sean Tuohy, Oher's adoptive father. Oher was largely unwilling to talk to Lewis about his life before he met the Tuohys. Therefore, this is, more accurately, the story of Oher as seen from the Tuohys' perspective, which is not quite the same thing.

There are so many pitfalls here that it's amazing Lewis navigates them as well as he does, and even he stumbles. There are stereotypes and pieces of American mythology lurking everywhere beneath this story, trying to make the story snap to them like a guiding grid: the wealthy white family welcoming in the poor black kid, the kid with amazing physical talent who is very bad at school, the black kid with an addict mother, the white Christian school who takes him in, the colleges who try to recruit him... you cannot live in this country without strong feelings about all of these things. Nestled next to this story like landmines are numerous lies that white Americans tell themselves to convince themselves that they're not racist. I could feel the mythological drag on this story trying to make Oher something he's not, trying to make him fit into a particular social frame. It's one of the reasons why I doubt I'll ever see the movie: it's difficult to imagine a movie managing to avoid that undertow.

To give Lewis full credit, he fights to keep this story free of its mythology every step of the way, and you can see the struggle in the book. He succeeds best at showing that Oher is not at all dumb, but instead is an extremely intelligent teenager who was essentially never given an opportunity to learn. He also provides a lot of grounding and nuance to Oher's relationship with the Tuohys. They're still in something of a savior role, but it seems partly deserved. And, most importantly, he's very open about the fact that Oher largely didn't talk to anyone about his past, including Lewis, so except for a chapter near the end laying out the information Lewis was able to gather, it's mostly conjecture on the part of the Tuohys and others.

But there is so much buried here, so many fault lines of US society, so many sharp corners of racism and religion and class, that Oher's story just does not fit into Lewis's evolution-of-football narrative. It spills out of the book, surfaces deep social questions that Lewis barely touches on, and leaves so many open questions (including Oher's own voice). One major example: Briarcrest Christian School, the high school Oher played for and the place where he was discovered as a potential NCAA and later professional football player, is a private high school academy formed in 1973 after the desegregation of Memphis schools as a refuge for the children of white supremacists. Lewis describes Oher's treatment as one of only three black children at the school as positive; I can believe that because three kids out of a thousand plays into one kind of narrative. Later, Lewis mentions in passing that the school balked at the applications of other black kids once Oher became famous, and one has to wonder how that might change the narrative for the school's administration and parents. There's a story there that's left untold, and might not be as positive as Oher's reception.

Don't get me wrong: these aren't truly flaws in Lewis's book, because he's not even trying to tell that story. He's telling the story of one exceptional young man who reached college football through a truly unusual set of circumstances, and he tells that story well. I just can't help but look for systems in individual stories, to look for institutions that should have been there for Oher and weren't. Once I started looking, the signs of systemic failures sit largely unremarked beneath nearly every chapter. Maybe this is a Rorschach test of political analysis: do you see an exceptional person rising out of adversity through human charity, or a failure of society that has to be patched around by uncertain chance that, for most people, will fail without ever leaving a trace?

The other somewhat idiosyncratic reaction I had to this book, and the reason why I've put off reading it for so long, is that I now find it hard to read about football. While I've always been happy to watch nearly any sport, football used to be my primary sport as a fan, the one I watched every Sunday and most Saturdays. As a kid, I even kept my own game statistics from time to time, and hand-maintained team regular season standings. But somewhere along the way, the violence, the head injuries, and the basic incompatibility between the game as currently played and any concept of safety for the players got to me. I was never someone who loved the mud and the blood and the aggression; I grew up on the west coast offense and the passing game and watched football for the tactics. But football is an incredibly violent sport, and the story of quarterback sacks, rushing linebackers, and the offensive line is one of the centers of that violence. Lewis's story opens with Joe Theismann's leg injury in 1985, which is one of the most horrific injuries in the history of sport. I guess I don't have it in me to get excited about a sport that does things like that to its players any more.

I think The Blind Side is a bit of a mess as a book, but I'm still very glad that I read it. Oher's story, particularly through Lewis's story-telling lens, is incredibly compelling. I'm just also wary of it, because it sits slightly askew on some of the deepest fault lines in American society, and it's so easy for everyone involved to read things into the story that are coming from that underlying mythology rather than from Oher himself. I think Lewis fought through this whole book to not do that; I think he mostly but did not entirely succeed.

The Tuohys have their own related book (In a Heartbeat), written with Sally Jenkins, that's about their philosophy of giving and charity and looks very, very Christian in a way that makes me doubtful that it will shine a meaningful light on any of the social fault lines that Lewis left unaddressed. But Oher, with Don Yaeger, has written his own autobiography, I Beat the Odds, and that I will read. Given how invested I got in his story through Lewis, I feel an obligation to hear it on his own terms, rather than filtered through well-meaning white people.

I will cautiously recommend this book because it's an amazing story and Lewis tries very hard to do it justice. But I think this is a book worth reading carefully, thinking about who we're hearing from and who we aren't, and looking critically at the things Lewis leaves unsaid.

Rating: 7 out of 10