Booknotes 5.11

All’s Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare, published 1623, play, 89 pages. It’s based on a story from The Decameron and is one of Shakespeare’s comedies, so I probably don’t need to elaborate further because what follows is surely not a surprise, but I will nevertheless because I am that kind of person: meh. And now, with that stunningly explicatory elaboration taken care of, let’s move on.

Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy, published 1871, fiction, 538 pages. Quite liked it. Good prose. The second half turned out to be more of a thriller than I expected. Looking forward to reading the rest of Hardy (for the prose and the characters, not the thrillerness), which I’m planning to do in publication order, as is now often my custom. Also, I didn’t expect to come across a “dang it” in the book. Apparently the phrase is not as modern as I thought.

Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, by Ed Conway, published 2023, nonfiction, 518 pages. Fascinating book! Sand, salt, oil, iron, copper, and lithium. If that list makes you say “ooh,” this will be a good book for you. Recycled steel is exciting. The fragile bottlenecks scattered throughout our material supply chains, however, are concerning — for example, 70% of the world’s niobium comes from a single mine in Brazil, and there are several similar bottlenecks for other things. (The percentage doesn’t even need to be that large for this to be an issue, as we’re seeing with the Strait of Hormuz.) A couple random facts that boggled my mind a bit: before standardization, there were 994,840 different types of axes (plural of axe, not axis) in the United States. And RAM is over 500 million times cheaper than it was in 1960. Whew. Looking forward to Conway’s new book, Trade World, which as it happens he announced the very day I finished reading this one.

Othello, by William Shakespeare, published 1603, play, 104 pages. Quite liked it, sad though it is. (So yes, further confirmation that I much prefer the tragedies to the comedies.)