Finished How Asia Works. The third section was on finance and…it turns out I don’t really care about finance. Maybe someday that’ll change, but I’m not there yet. That section was a murky slog through which I forced myself in the misguided hope that perhaps I’d pick up enough contextual clues to, you know, have a clue what it all meant. Overall, though, the book was excellent. The manufacturing section is still my favorite of the bunch.
I’ve resumed reading Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin biography, which I’d put on the backburner when I started serializing my reading. About a quarter of the way in, and wow, it’s eminently readable. Loving it. By the way, I have a profound weakness for books about inventors and scientists and (less common) printers, so if you have any good recommendations, please send them my way.
Fiction
Finished Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and liked it very much, even though there’s basically no magic and it’s pretty much fantasy Rome. Glad I still have most of K. J. Parker’s books left to read. (Shadow is the only other of his that I’ve read. And some short stories years ago.)
I’m a quarter of the way through Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter. It’s hitting a lot of good, intriguing points for me (in the vein of mysterious things happening) and I’m looking forward to the rest.