Booknotes 1.3

Nonfiction

• 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.