Booknotes 3.25

Nonfiction

• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott, published 1998. A bit slow and mildly repetitive in places, but overall a fascinating anthropological look at the resilience of social and natural diversity in the face of homogenizing nation states. Emerson’s saying about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds kept coming into my head throughout the book. “My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being.” Much of what Scott documents felt like a failure of UX, where planners didn’t pay attention to the people who’d be using/living the system. The urban planning parts reminded me that I need to try Jane Jacobs again. (I bounced off The Death and Life of Great American Cities last time I tried.) “A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order.” I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but that’s true, and a good reminder that sight is not the only sense and that accessibility concerns often end up affecting us all. The part where Scott talked about “the absence of a dense street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of the spatial irregularities that foster coziness, gathering places for informal recreation, and neighborhood feeling” also resonated with me. The grid-system suburbia I live in is nice, but I often find myself yearning for those spatial irregularities and higher density and informal gathering places. (That said, my church ward does meet the need for neighborhood feeling.) I also liked the parts about variolation leading to vaccination and about check dams. All in all, glad I read it, lots of food for thought.
• Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture, by Ross King, published 2000. This is Florence a hundred years earlier than Benvenuto Cellini and I’m here for it. A fascinating read. I loved the detail throughout the book on how they built the dome — the machine Brunelleschi designed to hoist heavy stones up hundreds of feet, for example. (Speaking of which, this book unexpectedly triggered my fear of heights over and over again.) Crazy how in Florentine law, people were considered adolescents until they turned twenty-four. And that prank Brunelleschi played on the carpenter! Great book, highly recommended.

Fiction

• Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, published 2003, science fiction (barely; it’s more historical fiction). Other than some fairly bawdy parts I didn’t care for, I generally liked it — readable throughout (if very long), and the scientific research aspect was fun, as was the variety in form (play fragments, epistolary, etc.). It’s completely bonkers in places. Lots of 1600s politics. Lots of Newton and Hooke and Leibniz and Pepys, too. (I have no idea how historically accurate it is, but that didn’t matter, I loved it anyway. The 1600s are my jam.) The Royal Society minutes were a hoot. And that ending! Whew.
• City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2022, fantasy. First in the Tyrant Philosophers series. I loved it — great worldbuilding and interesting characters (particularly Yasnic and his god, and also Ruslan’s fate). Enjoyed the Les Mis vibes when they showed up, and I felt it gave a compelling overall picture of life under an oppressive empire. The large number of points of view also worked well for me. Very much looking forward to the rest of the series.