Booknotes 4.25

Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 2016, fantasy. Third in the Penric & Desdemona series. This feels like the first Penric novella that has really clicked for me and the first that has felt like a Five Gods book, but I can’t remember much of the first one at all and I was distracted when I read the second (using it as a test book while building Scroll), so here’s a handful of salt. Either way, I loved this, and I think I love the Five Gods books even more than the Vorkosigan books. Bujold continues to be a favorite author.

Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Ada Palmer, published 2025, nonfiction. A history of the Renaissance told with a delightfully chatty, readable voice (uncommon in histories, at least in those I’ve read). Loved the historiographic aspects and the multifaceted approach to Renaissance history, and all the little biographies, too. I don’t have many books on my plan-to-reread list (because life is short and there are so, so many books I want to read before I eventually shuffle off this mortal coil), but this book is now on it. Lastly: I learned that lingua franca did not actually refer to French.

T. rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez, published 1997, nonfiction. Oh how I wish this book had a better title, one more appropriate to its contents (a serious history explaining how Alvarez and other scientists discovered that there was a catastrophic impact 65 million years ago and how they then tracked down the impact crater). Especially enjoyed the latter two-thirds where it got into the details of the science and the thinking involved — ex libro lapidum historia mundi, indirect extrapolation millions of years after the fact, etc.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville, published 1851, fiction. So, so good. Loved the wry voice, loved the amazing prose, loved the little essays and whale facts intermingled with the story, loved how quirky and bizarre and interesting it was throughout. (I now have an initial stub of a theory, by the way: the people who don’t like Moby-Dick probably don’t read for voice and/or don’t like nonfiction, or at least don’t like nonfiction mixed into their fiction. I can see how people who read for plot or maybe even character might not find the book of much interest.) One passage I liked, about families who lose sailors at sea: “Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes!” I had no idea Melville was only thirty-two when the book was published. So jealous.