Finished reading: Penric’s Demon: A Fantasy Novella in the World of the Five Gods (Curse of Chalion Series) by Lois McMaster Bujold 📚

I heard about Bujold on an episode of the Coode Street Podcast (found Coode Street because they had Jo Walton on, talking about her history of the Hugos). Anyway, in this episode, the hosts were talking about the ongoing question, does SFF focus world building to the detriment of characterization, which I didn’t know was a common critique of SFF (“name one memorable scifi character”). In the course of discussion, Gary Wolfe mentions Lois McMaster Bujold as an SFF writer who does characters well, so I looked her up on Libby, where her novella Penric’s Demon was available as a 4 hour audiobook, not too big a commitment, so I went for it.

Before I get to characters, world-building and whatever else, though, I’ll use the occasion of finishing another book to return to my question about what I’m after with books (reading books, maybe trying to write a book?) as I did with (Farthing)[https://ethancowan.com/2026/09/01/how-do-books-work.html]. This time I’m testing out the word ‘review’ as a way to think what kind of writing I might like to do, because on another episode of Coode Street, I heard them recommend an essay by Paul Kincaid called “a taxonomy of reviewing” which said, “reviewing refers to any piece of writing about a text that isn’t written by the author of the text itself.”

By this broad, loose definition, reviewing can cover anything from a blurb to a monograph. And that’s fair enough, because these are all ways we have of writing about creative texts. They are not all critical ways, they are not all analytical, they are not all objective, but they are all to some degree an outside eye upon the text in question.

So, a review of Penric’s Demon, not especially critical or analytical or objective or even interesting, just some words about someone else’s text.

Penric is a young, small-town lord riding a horse down a road in a fantasy world with green grass and blue skies. His older brother went off to become a soldier, but ended up dying in camp, from an illness, not even fighting. Pen’s father also died before the story started, so it would seem a certain kind of masculinity in Pen’s family is doomed.

Pen is engaged to a girl, about to be married, in fact, riding down the road to meet his betrothed when he comes to a crossroads. An older woman has fallen from a horse and lays dying. He wants to help. Even as she’s dying, she likes the look of him and says as her last words, “Accept it,” which he later learns means, accept the demon. He does, unconsciously, and wakes to find he has become the 13th (or so) person to have taken on this demon, meaning the demon lives in and through him now.

He can talk to the demon, and it talks back through his mouth, in the various voices of the previous hosts, all of whom were women.

“So are you 12 persons or 1?” Pen asked. “Yes,” said the Ruchia voice.

He gives them all a name, Desdemona.

So, it seems to be a story about the formation of a man, who is going to learn how to be in the world with the guidance of 12 different female life histories inside him.

Oh, and death. Seems like death is going to keep coming up.

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ok, so that’s just a synopsis or… Not saying bad or good or even how it’s related to much else. Just letting myself be light and not try too hard to make anything happen.

Finished reading: Farthing by Jo Walton 📚

I bought this Jo Walton book at Black & Read in Arvada, because I happened to see the name Jo Walton on the cover, and Jo Walton is on my radar. I found out about her through a podcast she did with Ada Palmer where the two of them talked about their interests in Science-Fiction/Fantasy and writing craft. I found out about Ada Palmer 5 or 6 years ago on a list of sci-fi books with interesting gender stuff (her Terra Ignota does gender neutral pronouns in a wild way). This is the second Jo Walton novel I’ve read, after Everybody’s Perfect (dreamscape, timeless Venice). This one is an alternate history in which Britain signed a peace treaty with Hitler.

I’m realizing… there’s a lot to say about the specifics of Farthing’s plot and characters and style, but I wont do that just yet, because first I want to articulate a general question I had while reading this book, but it’s also a question I’m having while reading other books this year, related to the fact that I might want to write a book someday, which is, How do books work? Obviously, there are many kinds of books and many things each author is doing with their books, so lots of different ways books work. But, I’m just trying to say that I read Farthing as part of a diffuse, vague, ill-defined (ie. just personal, intuitive) research project I’m doing about what books are, how they function in my life and what kinds of books I like.

That said, Farthing is an alternative history, murder mystery, thriller about fascism, class and identity in 20th century England. I felt like I was in safe hands with an author who clearly knows what she’s doing. I felt entertained, carried along. There were lots of great descriptions of food and clothing, very nice easing into the plot and then ratcheting the tension towards the middle and end of the book. Some poignant lines and revelations. And I CARED about the characters: some I was rooting for, others I felt annoyed with, others I found contemptible. And because it was all words (not a graphic novel, not a movie), it came together in that weird, wonderful way words take shape as images in the minds eye. The narrative had plenty of momentum.

Contrasted with the last book I read, Susan Moon’s Tofu Roshi, which was a satire about student teacher relationships in a spiritual lineage… Farthing had me feeling tensions and releases about how an entire national society and power structure would turn out. Even though Tofu Roshi had a narrative and some dramatic stakes, it was still in the realm of self-help books, so it was implicitly about me thinking about me or thinking how could a teacher help me. Farthing didn’t make me think of myself in any obvious way.

I liked this book. But, actually the most novel thing about reading this novel was how I read it: with the book strapped onto a reading stand (Levo G2 Adjustable Book Floor Stand), pages facing the floor, suspended three feet directly in front of my face as I lied comfortably on my back. Reading hands-free like this is a revelation. Over the course of the three days during which I read Farthing, I didn’t feel any of the normal physical stress, strain or discomfort that usually comes along with doing books, ie. neck bent forward, eyes down, or arms holding the book up in increasingly strange positions as I get fatigued. So, a mixed up post: there was Farthing, the novel, but there is also my question of what kind of book is this and how is that related or not to the kind of book I might like to write, and then there’s also finding and buying the book holder, which is so great, and will be an integral part of me reading many more books to come, so comfortably.

Finished reading: The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi by Susan Ichi Su Moon 📚

At the Ocamora Library, my eyes were scanning the spines of the books when this one jumped off the shelf. When I saw the name on the spine, Tofu Roshi, I had to know if that name was for real.

Reading the first sentence of the introduction by Gahan Wilson, I started to laugh in amazement. “Many teachers, in their pride, vainly boast that they know nothing, but it is Tofu alone who has truly succeeded in achieving total ignorance.” I couldn’t tell what was going on, but I immediately loved it.

The refreshing thing about this book, the thing that kept me reading, the reason I want to keep it in mind for my own writing, is how it skewers and roasts the genre of spiritual book to make it something delicious. Fictionalizing. Satirizing. So appropriate for a book about spiritual questions and gurus and enlightenment, etc.

Finished reading: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

Like 30 related New Yorker pieces all strung together, this book is mostly a series of easy-to-read, quickly told stories about the rises and falls of various Attention Merchants, whose general M.O. is to draw our attention with apparently free stuff (entertainment, diversion, or even just email) then resell our attention to advertisers, but whose methods and means change as media technologies develop. The fundamental pattern is that a small number of nameable people with huge amounts of economic ambition and power have, for two centuries now, continually offered “grand bargains” to anyone whose attention is up for grabs, and most of us keep accepting their terms, which are typically not great.

And merchandising attention is socially corrosive in the long run.

I’m really on an attention kick this spring, since reading Attensity!, about attention and how it gets hijacked. Dopamine Nation was about the way our nervous systems can tend toward compulsive overconsumption that gets us stuck in ruts. The Attention Merchants paints a broader picture of massive attentional “markets” or contests (economic, political, moral and intellectual) where powerful people are playing to win the public mind via mass attention capture.

This book helped me get an historical perspective that mass production of the industrial revolution NEEDS mass attention capture, because it’s easier and easier to make more and more consumable goods, and the people who make them need consumers… Maintenance of Everything had a helpful outline of the developmental path of mass production, which is the development of precision manufacturing, which went: government guns, private guns, sewing machines, bikes, Ford autos…

Also helpful to be shown that many successful attentional captures have inspired revolutionary reactions. One way to look at the 1960s and early 70s is as an attentional revolution. Leary and Alpert had the “International Federation for Internal Freedom.” Herbert Marcuse suggested the “Great Refusal” might lead to the ultimate freedom of living without anxiety. The counter-cultural vision was that “public mind would attend to non-commercial stuff—nature, spiritual paths, friends, family, lovers… media would maybe be live concerts or public interest programming.” (159) That’s the milieu in which Feldenkrais first came into public prominence at Esalen in 1972, and that’s the same vibe that inspired me in Attensity! And yet, the book also shows that every revolution, so far, has ended up perpetuating the status quo, once a new technology comes along…

The book ends with the point that any economic or political or moral or intellectual contest or “market” actually consists of two: the competition “on the merits,” but PRIOR to that, the contest for attention that determines what options or choices seem available. So the availability of our attention means there is the constant risk that the contest for attention will make the contest on the merits irrelevant…

Finished reading: Maintenance of Everything Part One by Stewart Brand

This is a beautiful book, like the actual materiality of the book is really nice, cover has kintsugi veins of gold, page layouts with interesting margins for captions and commentary, blue highlights whose meaning and function gradually dawn through reading. Some of the marginalia comes from people who helped Brand during the writing of the book by reading and commenting through a public drafting website tool called books in progress. Just seems like innovative, well considered book design.

The reading of the book was nice. Yet the shape of the argument or maybe just the shape of the content felt weird to me. Banger first chapter of three interlocking stories about solo boat racing (and maintenance). Then a much longer, more varied, subdivided second chapter, nominally about vehicles, but full of (well labeled) digressions… Good fun, but no feeling of beginning, middle, end, or where it’s going. No conclusion, i guess because it’s only part 1, but neither any cliffhanger or much effort to tease future parts.

Abstractable quotes:

“Just owning and using something is not yet mastery—we need a basic intelligibility of our possessions.” (58) That’s Crawford (Soulcraft) quoted by Brand. Ouch… so few of my possessions do i understand well enough to fix or maintain

“The power to maintain is the power to improve.” (63) Means that knowing how to maintain something means knowing how it works means seeing opportunities for improvement.

The developmental path of mass production is the development of precision manufacturing, which went: government guns, private guns, sewing machines, bikes, Ford autos… And i want to pair that with the rise of advertising (attention merchants).

So much of this book was about military history, which makes sense for the topic but also makes a different kind of sense after learning Stewart Brand was “a professional rifleman in the early 1960s, serving for two years as an infantry officer teaching basic training.” I had to update my model of him cause i had only ever heard him talk about himself as a flower child.

”Old systems fail in familiar and prepared for ways. New systems fail in unexpected and unprepared for ways.” (112 and 27)

Sustainability is a concept built around aspiration for the future. In contrast, sustainment is about getting to work now. (165)

“The opposite of maintenance mind is neglect mind. Neglect mind is part laziness, part ignorance, and part surrender to fantasy. Maintainers are realists.” (179-180)

“Sustainment is everything it takes to ensure prolonged endurance of capability.” (180)

Finished reading: Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke

Compulsive overconsumption. That’s the phrase. That’s what we do with almost everything now, including digital drugs like youtube and “social media.”

Dopamine is used as a scientific currency to measure the addictive potential of experiences.

The companies that benefit from our addictions exploit our brain chemistry. ”Dopamine Economy” and “Limbic capitalism.”

The way to find balance again is to abstain or at least self-bind, so homeostasis of our pain-pleasure equilibrium resets.

Hedonic set point. Strangely, hedonism leads to anhedonia. Even frequent exposure to “natural highs” is related to anhedonia. Hamster wheels are addictive (pump tracks are a drug).

Binding ourselves is a way to be free.

“Compulsive overconsumption of high dopamine goods is the antithesis of human attachment. Consuming leads to isolation and indifference.”

Interesting stuff at the end of the book about “club goods,” which are the rewards of belonging to a group with strict rules that reinforce “pro social shame.”

Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto

This is a very helpful primer on how to make notes that lead to writing.

I just finished reading: Shu Ha Ri by Richard Griffiths @writingslowly

I liked how short it was. I think it would fit in well with other books from Tracy Durnell’s In praise of the hundred page idea.

Shu Ha Ri is about learning through lineage, then keeping lineage alive. I liked the weave of examples from different ways (dōs) that run through the book. Most touching was the story of Jigoro Kano, founder of Judō, whose final request in life was to be buried wearing his white belt. I had already heard a fair bit about Kano because Moshe Feldenkrais studied with Kano, so Kano feels like an ancestor in the Feldenkrais lineage I’m practicing in. But I had never heard this detail about Kano’s intention to maintain beginner’s mind even after going through death.

I also appreciated the explanation of Keiko, a word for training that includes reference to 10 generations of practitioners before. It had me thinking about how lineage holders actually want an endlessness for their practice, for the “living knowledge” or the meme of the practice to go on and on.