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Reading — Prints 2.3

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Of note: I discovered a few days ago that Marvin (the ebook reader I use on iOS) lets you import custom fonts. Works great, love it. Marvin continues to be by far the best ebook reader I’ve found. It’s been four years since it was last updated, though, and I worry that it’s eventually going to stop working. Probably going to bite the bullet at some point and build my own web-based reader so I’m not dependent on outside apps that may disappear.

Recent nonfiction reads

  • I got partway through the first volume of Boswell’s Johnson, but then bailed. The letters were a little too much detail for me, given that I don’t actually know much about Johnson the writer (my interest is more in his lexicography). Might still come back to it.
  • This was more of a fictiony couple of weeks.

Recent fiction reads

  • Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse. I almost gave up around fifty pages in, but then things got interesting. (Which is why I usually try to give books at least a hundred pages.) Loved the setting and the magic.
  • Diamond Dogs, by Alastair Reynolds. Novella. A tower progression story like Sufficiently Advanced Magic, but much darker. Brutal and violent. More math, too, which was the most disturbing thing of all. (I jest.) The story was interesting in a detached, cold sort of way, but it didn’t really speak to me.
  • Wakers, by Orson Scott Card. While I still prefer OSC’s early style more than his recent barebones style, and while I could certainly do without the juvenile humor, and while every character being sarcastic in the exact same way is now maybe a bit much for me, the story was compelling and the world was intriguing.
  • The Last Witness, by K. J. Parker. Novella. Oof, that ending. I would not say this is a happy story. Liked it a lot, though. Parker’s style fits my brain really well.

Books acquired since last post

  • SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome — Mary Beard
  • The First Human — Ann Gibbons
  • Valor — John Gwynne
  • A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa — Alexis Okeowo
  • Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century — Alice Wong
  • Lightblade — Zamil Akhtar
  • The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America — Ethan Michaeli
  • Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing — Randall Stross
  • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed — James C. Scott
  • Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down — J. E. Gordon
  • Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages — Richard E. Rubenstein
  • The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution — Peter Hessler
  • Saint Death’s Daughter — C. S. E. Cooney
  • Writing Mormon History: Historians and Their Books — Joseph Geisner
  • Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy — Adam Jentleson
  • Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture — Neil Dahlstrom
  • James Patterson: The Stories of My Life — James Patterson
  • Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall — Andrew Meier
  • The President’s Man: The Memoirs of Nixon’s Trusted Aide — Dwight Chapin
  • What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy — Jo Walton
  • Academ’s Fury — Jim Butcher
  • Cursor’s Fury — Jim Butcher
  • The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World — Patrick Wyman
  • The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years — Sonia Shah
  • Convictions: A Prosecutor’s Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves — John Kroger
  • The Tragedy of Great Power Politics — John J. Mearsheimer