Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
HERE’s a running list of things I’ve been generally interested in, or have spent time googling, BEFORE they came up in this book. Sometimes during reading this I just thought: does Neal Stephenson snoop on my browser history?
- falconry
- kabaddi, the traditional/modern Indian team sport of tackle-tag
- Indian geography (I’ve been trying to learn the Indian states, almost got ‘em locked)
- climate change
- climate engineering, specifically high-altitude sulfur injection
- the economics of running giant gas stations like Buc-ee’s
- feral hog problems
- many, many references to Moby-Dick
a note about Termination Shock
You either like books where Neal Stephenson explains things to you, or you don't. I guess I am in the first category! This is a near-future scifi about climate disaster and climate engineering, via stratospheric sulfur injection, and it has been one of the most fun books I've read in a while.
a note about Termination Shock
There are so much specific language about time and place - 1920s countryside England - I was really surprised to find this was published in 1980. I suppose the ethos of it feels more modern!
a note about A Month in the Country
I read this a few years back after Adam recommended it - it didn’t land particularly for me, and I apparently didn’t even make a listing for it here. But reading it again as part of our book club, and wow, it’s great.
Our hero is a near-penniless art restorer, whose life has blown up during WWI (wife left him, definitely has PTSD from the trenches). He arrives in a small town to work on uncovering a fresco, camps in the belfry, and is slowly drawn back to life and community. It sounds trite but it’s charming while not being cheesy at all.
a note about A Month in the Country
Another Household potboiler; these are fun. Enough wry Englishness and reserve to make them a cut above the kind of 'spy thriller' at which I would normally turn up my nose. Notably this one features an anarchist secret agent, who's been working with the non-soviet communists. Our hero is a terrorist, and has been working to bring about the True Universal Communism in England. But the new plan might be going too far, and our hero decides to investigate - putting himself at risk from all sides. He's basically entertaining the idea of double-crossing his own terrorist network, but there's no way he can go straight and actually go to the Authorities.
All three Geoffrey Household books I've read have this at their core: the hero must Do It Himself with no recourse to an outside network. Is it the prototype of every Mission:Impossible movie, where Ethan Hunt's team is disavowed by their IMF agency and must save the world by themselves?
a note about Hostage: London
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
…then sent a short affectionate note to Lotte, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who could be relied upon to ignore it. Not that she was a terrible person, or that their relationship was bad, just that she was sixteen and for all practical purposes dwelled on another planet.
an excerpt from Termination Shock
[I really loved this quick daisy-chain explainer: Stephenson just rattles this off as a way to explain why in the near-future there is a illegal campground of RVs and makeshift camps in the green space surrounding the Houston airport.]
—
In the winter and spring, East Texas had seen an unusual pattern of weather, if anything could be considered unusual nowadays, but to make a long story short, had apparently been perfect for fire ants. In all honesty, conditions always seemed perfect for fire ants. But according to people like Dr. Rutledge, who really knew their stuff, this was the best ant year ever.
The water had then gotten higher. Not in a single convulsive flood that would have drowned the ants in their burrows, but a little at a time. The ants had edged toward higher ground, which was where people tended to build houses. Houston was the third largest city in North America, so the result was what Dr. Rutledge drily called ‘Human/Ant Encounters’, on a scale never before seen. Thousands of emergency room visits, not just from ant bites, but collateral damage, such as Texans setting fire to themselves when trying to burn ant nests with gasoline.
Fire ants answer to weird signals that humans can only guess at. One of them apparently was that they were drawn to the smell of ozone. Ozone could be produced in a lot of different ways, but a very common one in that area was relays in air conditioning units. A relay was a big electrical switch with mechanical parts that actually moved, the thing that made an audible click when it came on. Most everything else now had gone to solid state. But for some reason known only to electrical engineers, relays on air conditioning units had to have actual pieces of metal that came together to establish contact, or pulled apart to turn it off. Whenever that happened, there was a little spark that produced ozone.
In this part of the world, it was typical for air-conditioning units to be installed on concrete pads external to the house. Ozone-seeking ants could easily get into the ventilation slots, to seek out the relays. There, the fate that awaited them was to be electrocuted or mechanically smashed the next time the relays cycled.
Remains of dead ants built up on the contacts, and fouled them to the point that the relay had to be replaced. The supply chain for these relays extended back to China, where one company had come to dominate the market. It could not produce and ship them at anything like the pace needed to replace the units being destroyed by fire ants in East Texas.
People came up with various jury-rigged workarounds, but the upshot was that over a short span of time, the places where hundreds of thousands of people lived became uninhabitable. Some folks could tough out a Houston summer with window fans, but most looked for alternatives. Just for starters, this meant filling every available hotel room in greater Houston.
RVs—already at a premium because of COVID-19, COVID-23, and COVID-27, and the general inability of Americans to travel outside of the Lower 48—spiked in price as people snapped those up and parked them in their driveways. People went full nomad, and began to park them in every legal campsite they could find. When those were full, they began to park illegally.an excerpt from Termination Shock
A bakery was looking to hire a dependable baker. Two miles down the road, an auto parts store had a job opening for a dependable sales associate. Dependability was a major preoccupation of Lawton’s managerial class. Rufus could see people walking, bicycling, or skateboarding up and down the same streets, who it could be inferred, had failed that dependability test. Young Rufus might have assumed that this drought of dependability was a problem peculiar to Lawton, had he not joined the army and become aware of the fact that it was a worldwide phenomenon. If you did happen to be one of those rare people blessed or cursed, take your pick, with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere. The world’s howling need for it would suck you into all kinds of situations that might look peachy, if you’d just fallen off the Lawton turnip truck, but in the light of experience probably needed to be vetted a little more carefully before saying yes.
an excerpt from Termination Shock
That command was aimed at the Royal Webmaster, an antiquated job title. Social Media Coordinator would have been more up to date, but it was common in royal courts to have outdated references to a bygone age. Saskia could be guarded by men in bearskin hats riding horses; why, she could as well have a Royal Webmaster.
an excerpt from Termination Shock
Often since that long-ago Sunday, I have wondered why it is that men with large mustaches have this facility of declamatory prayer. For the stationmaster plainly had a fine relationship with his Maker (who he addressed as an old and valued friend: he also had a splendid, free-ranging mustache. Whereas Mr. Jagger's tea-time grace was more propitiatory, uneasily terser: I seem to recall that his mustache was closely clipped.
an excerpt from A Month in the Country