Another reason we need to read fiction, for real life...John MacArthur in Harper's:

"Finally, there are the great realist novelists, who often see more clearly than journalists. So far, my Google searches have not picked up any excerpts from Zola’s novel "Money" being read on the nightly news. In this brilliant chronicle of a speculative stock bubble, launched by a character named Saccard in 1860s Paris, Zola cuts right to the heart of America’s boom-and-bust neurosis: “Wasn’t such great and rapid prosperity the result of the methods for which [Saccard] was now being blamed? All of this came together. If one accepted the success, one had to accept the risks. When you overheat a machine, it sometimes explodes.”"

Bill Bibbens on The Moustache of Understanding, How Muslims Made Europe, and the T'ang Dynasty:

The Southern hills, how mournful!
A ghostly rain sprinkles the empty grass.
In Ch'ang-an, on an autumn midnight,
How many men grow old before the wind?
Dim, dim, the path in the twilight,
Branches curl on the black oaks by the road.
The trees cast upright shadows and the moon at the zenith
Covers the hills with a white dawn.
Darkened torches welcome a new kinsman:
In the most secret tomb these fireflies swarm.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

by Terry Pratchett. Here the Discworld mirror reflects the clash between the motivations of love of doing (the techies and organization loyalists) and sheer greed (the financial sharks). A small time swindler is given his choice of running the virtually defunct postal service of Ankh-Morpork or . . . well, the alternative is a choice, but not one you'd want to take. The post office has only a few aged employees who long ago quit actually delivering the mail -- they just follow postal regulations regarding office procedures. Reinvigorating the postal service attracts the hostile attention of the privately owned clacks (telecommunications) company, which had swindled the founders out of their creation and is now running it down as a cash cow -- no maintenance and preference for cheap unskilled labor.

The copyright date is 2004, and I suspect Pratchett was playing off the British fights over cost and efficiency of private and public ownership. However, the financial dealings made me feel that it was written for this past month.

As usual with Pratchett, the story is entertaining and inventive, and the events laugh out loud funny. And there are always the quotations. Some favorites from this book:

"What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter."

"No one was sorry for anything because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometrical otherworld, and "were to be regretted".

"...Fiction cannot shed the world because its materials are necessarily bits of world. The writer's materials, common sense says, are various characters, places, actions, ideas, and actual or mental objects. The writer's materials are real or imagined phenomena.

"One could say, however, that the writer's materials are words and the other paraphernalia of language. After all, a writer does not sit at his desk pushing little people and landscapes around." (p. 69)

I'm fond of the better mystery short stories collections, many of which have punning titles like this. A number of these books are holiday-themed--quite clearly in my mind for marketing as holiday presents--but why did the original authors write them?
The contrast is striking between the holiday celebration of life, the bright colors and lights, the laughter, food, the friends and family--and crime, where all these things get under your skin to love or hate.

"The Christmas decorations proved as elaborate and festive as Maplethorpe had promised. In the shadow of an enormous tree thick with ornaments, I was introduced to several revelers of about my host's age, though they acted a decade younger."
Jon L. Breen, (p 136.)

Noir styles aside for the moment, mystery stories are in large part about the values of our lives, and knowing ourselves--are there any more lovingly detailed portraits than those of the victim, the suspects, the community, in some of these stories?

Holmes says, "I am always intrigued by how little attention we pay to familiar things, which are to us the most important."
Loren D. Estleman, (p. 110.)

A friend of mine argues that the purpose of the romance is to recreate the patriarchy, but in fact I would argue that the mystery is an attempt to reestablish, over and over, the rule of law and the deliverance of justice.

"Are you suggesting Lord Chislehurst was memerised?"
"I suspect something even more ambitious and diabolical. You may count on it, Watson, there is skullduggery afoot."
(Estleman, p. 110.)

So we may read such collections guiltlessly in the very bosom of our families and friends during the bright-lighted holidays in the hopes of finding justice...clinging to the idea that the world may be set right.
With already created characters Holmes and Watson, we experience the comfortable of the familiar: the humor, the stylized, dramatic recognizable language and relationships.

"You never fail to astonish me, Holmes," said I.
"That is one of your more endearing qualities," said he..."
(Bill Crider, p. 210.)

Holmes and Watson are brought to entertaining fictional life here by well-established mystery authors like Barbara Paul, Reginald Hill, Edward D. Hoch and Carole Nelson Douglas.

Touching stories of country life, about character and hard work, all written before 1930. With both heartbreak and triumph.

"I ain't goin' into the house till you tell me what them men is doin' over there in the field," (Mother) said.

"Then she stood waiting....there were meek downward lines around her nose and mouth; but her eyes, fixed upon the old man, looked as if the meekness had been the result of her own will, never the will of another.

"They were in the barn, standing before the wide-open doors. The spring air, full of the smell of growing grass and unseen blossoms, came in their faces. The deep yard in front was littered with farm-wagons and piles of wood; on the edges, close to the fence and house, the grass was a vivid green, and there were some dandelions."(p. 1.)

"I cannot give meaning to my life by saying I am linked to advancing justice in the world, where this means that I read the newspapers every day or week and thereby notice how justice and injustice fare. That is too trivial and too insubstantial a link. (Still, knowing external things and understanding how they are valuable may constitute a nontrivial link.)"

Nozick then goes on to talk about understanding value in a way that leads me to think he would find a number of our analyses nontrivial. (I'm not quoting the passage here because it's rather dense with much repetition of the same words, a common flaw of Nozick's...Here is its concluding sentence: "Your connection with the value, then, is itself valuable; and meaning is gotten through such a valuable connection with value.")

"Many will see the point and goal of the process in the achieving of the unities, and hence see the breaking apart of the previous unities merely as a means toward better and more adequate new ones (...where further unities (are) reached, not to cases we would classify as decay), while others might see the transcending of the previous unities and limits as the point of the process wherein people exercise and demonstrate their nature as beings who strive and transcend."
(all from p.168.)

The Enterprise (the one with Kirk, Spock, Scott, McCoy and Uhura) is sent to assist a planet undergoing an epidemic. The disease is called "the long death." More than half the populace is ill.
The planet's population are graceful catlike beings (think bipedal panthers) -- and they have a terrible secret.
When Nurse Christine Chapel falls ill with "the long death," the horrible truth about the disease -- that like rabies, it can affect multiple species, and there's no cure -- spurs the crew to explore that terrible secret, in a desperate search for a way to stop the disease.

It's a wonderful primer on public health, it's got the elements of a great epidemiological mystery, it explains bacteriophages, and Janet Kagan is a fine SF writer. I wish she'd done more books in this milieu.

I think you'll enjoy this, if you give it a chance.

We can admit that we’re killers … but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes! Knowing that we’re not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0

Paul Erdman's The Panic of '89, published in 1987, is an account of the "near meltdown" of the US economy brought about by a fiscal crisis deliberately created by the finance and oil ministers from Venezuela, Brazil, and Mexico (facilitated by a Swiss banker) in which all three countries would default on their foreign debt, leading to the default of Bank of America...

Overplotted (it involves not just the manipulation of markets, but a terrorist plot involving "Carlos the Jackal" and Germany's Red Brigade -- and its only 304 pages long) with generic "political thriller" writing, its most interesting in terms of seeing how a financial crisis would be defined a mere 20 years ago.

From the book jacket...
With the most vulnerable targets in their sights, the team precipitate a chain reaction of events that are shockingly all too real. The defaults set off a massive withdrawal of short-term deposits. The Dow tumbles over a hundred and fifty points. The dollar plunges...."

Of course, everything turns out fine in the end. The plotters get their comeuppance (Gorbachev blows up their plane -- but everyone thinks the CIA did it), developed nations agree to buy large quantities of oil at $20/barrel (and coffee at $1.35 for Brazil), the US establishes a $25 Billion Latin American Debt Relief fund, Bank of America is saved by the injection of $5 billion in capital, and the handsome and brilliant former head of the IMF winds up with the beautiful and sassy reporter.

But can anyone imagine a time when a 150 point drop in the Dow represented something horrible?

(and to answer today's question -- I buy secondhand -- and only dirt cheap, or I get them for free (people are always giving away books on craigslist -- I pick them up, pull out the ones I want, and then give the rest to thrift stores run by charities.)

Christopher Lydon:

Which sounds like my mother’s joke about the visitor to Boston from faraway, Philadelphia probably, who asked a Boston lady: “And where do you get your hats?” And the Boston lady replied: “Get our hats? My dear, we have our hats!”

Similarly with my books. Although I occasionally trek to the Mall, and sit in Borders, and pretend I'm in a city for an hour.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.