World Fantasy Award²⁰²⁰ (reading list addenda)

Here are the five nominees for the World Fantasy Award 2020, not that I am familiar with this other award, which 2019 selection does not cover my reading list. And neither does the 2018 edition. Except for the unique ravenesque Ka. At least, this year, I have voraciously read one of them, tremendously enjoyed other books by Ann Leckie, and would be most tempted by reading Japanese fantasy. Adding to my already high pile of books to take on (potential) vacations for the end of the month… or to read at home if again quarantined.

• Queen of the Conquered, by Kacen Callender (Orbit)
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook Books/Orbit UK)
• The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
• Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com)
• The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa (trans.Stephen Snyder) (Pantheon/Harvill Secker)

reading pile for X break

marauders of the lost sciences

The editors of a new blog entitled Marauders of the Lost Sciences (Learn from the giants) sent me an email to signal the start of this blog with a short excerpt from a giant in maths or stats posted every day:

There is  a new blog I wanted to tell you 
about which  excerpts one  interesting or 
classic  paper  or  book  a day  from the 
mathematical  sciences.  We plan on daily
posting across the  range of mathematical 
fields and at any level, but about 20-30% 
of the posts in queue are from statistics.

The goal is to entice people to read the great 
works of old.

The first post today was from an old paper by 
Fisher applying Group Theory to the design of 
experiments.

Interesting concept, which will hopefully generate comments to put the quoted passage into context. Somewhat connected to my Reading Statistical Classics posts. Which incidentally if sadly will not take place this year since only two students registered. should take place in the end since more students registered! (I am unsure about the references behind the title of that blog, besides Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and Norman’s Marauders of Gor… I just hope Statistics does not qualify as a lost science!)

X’mas bookreads

Even though I am beyond schedule at several levels of reality, I took some time off during the X’mas break to read a few of the books from my to-read pile. The first one was The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Williams. While I read two fantasy series by Williams, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, and Shadowmarch, which major drawback was that they both were unnecessarily long, this short novel is a mix of urban fantasy and of detective story, except that the detective working for Heaven in our current universe and fighting the “Opposition”, i.e. Hell, at every moment. This may sound quite a weird setting, but I nonetheless enjoyed the plot, the characters and the witty dialogues (as in “a man big enough to have his own zip code”). There were some lengthy parts, inevitably, but the whole scheme was addictive enough that I read it within two days. Now, there is a second (and then a third) volume in the series that does not sound up to par, judging from the amazon reviews. But this first volume got a very positive review from Patrick Rothfuss and it can be read on its own.

The second book I read over the vacations in Chamonix is Olen Steinhauer’s An American spy. This is the third instalment in the stories of Milo Weaver, the never-truly-retired Tourist. The volume is more into tying loose ends from previous books than into creating a new compelling story, even though it plays on the disappearance of loved ones and on a maze of double- and triple-agents. The fact that the story is told from many perspectives does not help (it is as if Weaver is now a secondary character) and the conclusion is fairly anticlimactic. A bit of nitpicking: a couple of spies (Tourists) travel to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia on a tourist visa, but there is no such thing as a Saudi tourist visa. Plus, the behaviour of the characters there is incompatible with the strict laws of Saudi Arabia.

A third book completed during those vacations is Gutted, by Tony Black. (I had actually bought this book in Warwick for my son’ British studies project but he did not look further than the backcover.) The book is taking place in Edinburgh, starting on Corstorphine Hill with a dog beating, and continuing in the seediest estates of Edinburgh where dog fights are parts of the shadow economy. The main character of the novel is the anti-hero Gus Drury, who is engaged so thoroughly in self-destruction that he would make John Rebus sound like a teetotaller! Gus is an ex-journalist who lost his job and wife to scoosh, running a pub with the help of two friends. Why he gets involved in an investigation remains unclear to me for the whole book: While Black has been hailed as a beacon for Celtic Noir, and while the style is gritty and enjoyable, I find the plot a wee bit shallow, with an uncomfortable number of coincidences. While finding this book was like discovering a long lost sibling of Rankin’s Rebus, with a pleasurable stroll through Edinburgh (!), I am far from certain I can contemplate reading the whole series…

Lastly, I read (most of) Giant Thief, by David Tallerman. By bits. This may be the least convincing book in the list. The story is one of a thief who finds himself enrolled in an army he has no reason to support and steals an artefact which value he is unaware of when deserting, along with a giant. The pursuit drags on forever. There are many reasons I disliked the book: the plot is shallow, the main character is the ultimate cynic, with not enough depth to build upon. Definitely missing the sparkling charm of the Lies of Locke Lamorra.

Reading list for ABC PhD course

As the ABC PhD course at CREST is about to start (!), I am thinking of setting a few on-line papers to read. Since the most specific topic is ABC convergence, here is the reading list:

• Blum M.G.B. (2010) Approximate Bayesian Computation: a nonparametric perspective. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 105: 1178-1187
• Dean, T.A., Sumeetpal, Singh S.S., Jasra, A. and Peters, G.W. (2010) Parameter Estimation for Hidden Markov Models with Intractable Likelihoods. Cambridge University Engineering Department Technical Report 66,  arXiv:1103.5399v1
• Fearnhead, P. and Prangle, D. (2012) Constructing summary statistics for approximate Bayesian computation: semi-automatic approximate Bayesian computation. J. Royal Statistical Society (Series B)
• Marin, J.-M., Pillai, N., Robert, C.P. and Rousseau, J. (2011) Relevant statistics for Bayesian model choice. arXiv:1110.4700
• Robert, C.P., Cornuet, J.-M., Marin, J.-M. and  Pillai, N.S. (2011) Lack of confidence in approximate Bayesian computational (ABC) model choice. PNAS (Open Access). 108(37), 15112-15117, arXiv:1102.4432
• Wilkinson, R. (2008) Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) gives exact results under the assumption of model error. arXiv:0811.3355