Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

sudden unexpecting shippy feels in a couple of these books?? no brain, stop it.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Might've seen a movie adaptation of this once as a kid. Have fragmented memories of scenes.

I...genuinely didn't expect the book to constantly refer to Fagin as "the Jew", despite my prior osmosis, why. Kinda cross Brownlow let Monks get away scot-free, kinda bewildered by the last minute reveal that Rose and Oliver were related which I guess fits with them sharing the same characterization of The Nicest. Which I get, the whole point is that Oliver only escapes his childhood horrors due to the fortune of his birth and random chance.

But that left me far more invested in poor Nancy, who hinders and then helps Oliver, who refuses to take the escape routes offered, and is so confident in her (ultimately correct) prediction that she's doomed. :(

The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Non-fiction about the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis in US, from the perspective of some guys who saw it coming and in fact bet on it happening, winning big when it hit.

Subprime mortgages are home loans issued to buyers with low credit ratings - buyers who normally wouldn't get loans because they have a higher likelihood of defaulting - and often with higher interest rates that were obfuscated from borrowers who didn't know better. Combine that with a housing bubble due to pop, tiny to no downpayments, ARMs and banks encouraging borrowers to take out loans wildly disproportionate to their income and well, crisis. That's the consumer side of it.

The finance side of it is that all of these subprime loans were packaged together in bonds that concealed both the actual likelihood of defaults and fragility of these bonds to defaults. Firms were selling these bonds as a sure thing, aided by ratings agencies giving them the highest ratings possible despite said agencies having little insight into the actual structure of the bonds. (Hint: Pays way more to work at one of said firms than a rating agency.) So our protagonists, three different hedge fund groups, are the few people who dig into these bonds and go what the fuck, this is a house of cards that's going to collapse, how can I short this.

They figure out a way to short it, and the rest is basically waiting it out. (There is dark humor in that their shorts results in more financial instruments that resemble the bonds getting sold - basically you can't short these bonds the way one might think of shorting a stock and the resulting finance mumbo jumbo creates derivative products)

Pretty straightforwardly written, though my eyes tended to glaze over the precise numbers. Was interesting since I didn't know anything about this side of subprime mortgage meltdown.

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

Sequel to Three-Body Problem. Loved the plot strategizing, disliked how weird this book is about women.

Main good thing first: I loved the strategizing, especially the Wallfacer vs Wallbreaker parts. It was fun to watch each concealed plan get dismantled, one by one, especially the thrill of when the very first one happened. This was a level of sci-fi shenanigans that worked for me. The dynamic between shitter Luo Ji and super-cop Shi Qiang was enjoyable. My favourite part of the book was either when Luo Ji says goodbye to Shi Qiang, or the quiet moment in the dark where they discuss what "the dark forest" really is.

Yet. Managed to be weirder about women than the first book, what with Luo Ji's fantasy woman actually being found out of the entire population and being interested in him, having a kid with them and then fucking off to hibernation because the UN wants her to (hired her to?). That entire subplot was ???? There's a female ship captain....she just wants one of the dude PoVs to be her daddy. There's a female science officer...she's there so the old physicist PoV can be sad when his warnings aren't heeded. Keiko's reveal was super cool in the moment, but in light of everything else I suspect it was simply for a closest partner betrayal, and neither female Wallfacers or gay people exist in this fictional universe.

In the end it evened out to liking this book more than the first one.

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Sequel to The Dark Forest. Didn't care much for the plot, and this book manages to be extra weird about women, like it's trying to out-compete the previous two in the series, like come on. Worst of the series.

So, one might ask, how does the series get even weirder about women? Super simple. Firstly, the book goes on about how the world is super feminized in the peaceful future era and a character from our time can't tell apart the men and the women and how she's distressed by this and how such a feminized world is incapable of dealing with when the peace is broken, and it's a good thing that they have regular 'ole capable men from our time who are ready to rise up when that happens.

Second is said character, Cheng Xin, our major PoV for the book. Cheng Xin basically exists to always make the wrong choice that fucks over humanity, and she always does because she feels too maternal towards the world and wants to protect it. And all the dudes around her who actually do shit are like, there there, no one expected you to actually accomplish anything. It gets slowly infuriating over the course of the book. The one thing she does right is propose the Staircase Program and that happens in the first 10% of the book. I swear, the book even lampshades it when it has her go into hibernation because Wade is so much better than her at making her company research lightspeed travel.

Okay, plot stuff. I dunno, this really dragged for me. I liked Cheng Xin hanging out with AA and Fraisse. I enjoyed the fairy tales and the interpretations of them. But by the time we reached Cheng Xin's star I was ready for a breather, and instead she and Yifan get skipped 18 million years in the future, because who wanted to see her and Tianming meet anyway, I guess. What a shaggy dog story.