An Immense World, by Ed Yong, published 2022. One of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read. It’s about the different ways animals sense the world (smell, sight, electric fields, etc.) and is chock-full of facts and scientific discovery stories that lit up my brain, like this one, to take an example at random: “Octopuses are different. Unlike squid, they can touch every part of their bodies. They can even reach inside themselves to groom their own gills—the equivalent of a human putting a hand down their throat to scratch their lungs.” While reading the book I wanted to switch careers and become a scientist. Definitely planning to read it again someday. (Which is saying something; I’m not much of a rereader.)
Medieval Horizons, by Ian Mortimer, published 2023. Also fascinating, about the large-scale changes that happened in different parts of life during the Middle Ages (travel, literacy, warfare, sense of self, etc.), and how those changes set the stage for modernity, in some ways more importantly than the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution. A compelling antidote to the idea that medieval times were static and boring.
Fiction
The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison, published 2021, fantasy. Cemeteries of Amalo book 1. Really liked it. I think I even liked it as much as The Goblin Emperor, different though it was. The worldbuilding really works for me, even (and perhaps especially) the long, complicated names and the traditions and protocols. Looking forward to the rest of the series and to trying out Addison’s earlier books.
The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, by K. S. Villoso, published 2017, fantasy. More action-packed and less of a character study than I expected from what I’d heard about it.
High, by Adam Roberts, published 2024, science fiction. Interesting ideas, decent prose, generally liked it. I feel like I haven’t read nearly enough of this sort of idea-driven science fiction in a while, though that may say more about my memory (or lack thereof) than anything. Looking forward to reading more of Roberts’ work.
Ted Gioia’s reading list on stupidity, starting with Thucydides. “This book is absolutely the place to start—and it marks an important moment in human culture. For the first time in the Western world, a historian turned to his own society and said: ‘This is stupid.’” I’ve started reading Thucydides because of this article and it’s surprising how modern it feels in some regards.
Hamilton Nolan on public ownership of public goods. “When you take a vital service and privatize it, you ensure that it will run according to a private profit motive rather than running with the goal of providing the best service to the public.” Agreed. More generally, capitalism (at least the late-stage growth capitalism we see at scale, the surveillance capitalism, the crush-the-poor capitalism; I’m not talking about small business here) more and more seems to me to be at odds with the gospel. (Which I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by, given that a philosophy of selfishness was always destined to be at odds against a philosophy of selflessness.)
We’ve started playing a new game as a family, dubbed the journal game. One person picks a random entry from their journal and reads it aloud, leaving out the date and any extremely obvious giveaways. The others try to guess when the entry was written.
It’s turning out to be surprisingly fun, at least in part from solving a mystery using clues, and in part from remembering the past and sharing stories. (Not everyone in the family has a wide range of dates covered by their journal, by the way, but that hasn’t stopped us.)
Mike Grindle on his one big text file. I don’t know that I’ll do this, but it’s still fun to read about. (At work I have a handful of text files — a to-do list, a backburner list, a log, a list of what I did each day. For personal stuff, I use my home-crafted apps since I want to be able to use my phone.)
Andrea Anderson on ope, which turns out to not be from the Midwest after all. (Until I read this article, by the way, I had no idea that I myself say ope. I do.)
Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, published 2007. Quite good. For me — who didn’t know much about Stalin beyond a vague “leader of Russia during WWII who killed a lot of people” and who also didn’t know much about the October Revolution beyond it taking place in 1917 — this filled in a lot of details. Fascinating (and tragic) to see where single-minded devotion to revolution can take a man. Stalin feels like a real person in my head now, human and all (surprisingly human, really), no longer just a vague supervillain. Also, I had no idea about all the exiles. Or all the many girlfriends. Or the disturbing age gaps with some of them. That part was gross. (Different times? Sure, to some degree. But still.)
Fiction
Hidden, by Benedict Jacka, published 2014, fantasy. Alex Verus book 5. Liked it. The overarching story continues to be interesting. (I don’t want to spoil anything with these reviews, which makes it hard to say much of anything about books later in a series like this. Apologies.)
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, volume 6, by Beth Brower, published 2022, fiction. Good as usual. Delightful and witty and fun. I’m debating whether to hurry up and read volume 7 so I can finally get caught up with my wife (and be ready for volume 8, which hopefully drops sometime this year) or wait a bit first since volume 8 isn’t ready quite yet and I don’t want to run out of Emma M. Lion books yet.
Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire, published 2020, fantasy. Wayward Children book 5. Dark and imaginative and somewhat uncomfortable. I don’t know that this one worked quite as well for me, but I still plan to continue reading the series.
Mandy Brown on kinworking instead of networking. I like this reframing — much more human. “Think of the work of checking in on people, arranging gatherings, keeping up the group DM, providing emotional and material support.”
Jeremy Keith on reading patterns. I loosely try to balance my reading between nonfiction and fiction and between female and male authors, but I’m not rigorous about it, and I’m sure I could do better at diversifying my reading.
Matt Haggard on paper planners. I’ve been all-digital for a while, but this intrigues me. (Both the idea of returning to paper and the idea of designing my own planners.)
Johnny.Decimal, an interesting organization scheme. I don’t know that I’ll ever adopt it in full, but some of the ideas seem useful, and (for now) I’ve started using a similar categorization scheme for cataloging projects.
Christopher Jones, an assistant professor of history at BYU and editor of the Journal of Mormon History, joins Book of Mormon Art Catalog director Jenny Champoux. They discuss Harrowed Up No More by Ben Crowder. This episode complements week 31 (Alma 36–38) of the 2024 “Come, Follow Me” Book of Mormon curriculum.
I’m heavily biased here, of course, but I enjoyed watching this. It’s rewarding to see people not only discuss the symbolism I was thinking about while making the piece but also interpret it in new ways I hadn’t thought of before.
GT Academy, a series on how to design a sans serif typeface.
Benjamin Reinhardt on what it takes to get new materials out of the lab and into mass production. “Despite university teams regularly announcing triumphantly that they’ve created a material with seemingly magical properties like artificial muscles made out of carbon nanotubes or ‘limitless power’ from graphene, new materials-enabled human capabilities have been rare in the past 50 years. Why is there such a gap between headlines and reality when it comes to new materials? Is there anything we can do about it?”
Turning Pages, by John Sargent, published 2023. Ah, I love books about publishing. Several good bookmaking stories in here, though perhaps not as many as I would have liked. I somehow went into this book thinking Sargent was a mid-level editor or something; it wasn’t until at least halfway through that I realized he was the CEO (of Macmillan). And…CEOs are quite a bit less interesting to me than the people who actually work on the books. But this was still a good book.
Breaking Bread with the Dead, by Alan Jacobs, published 2020. I’ve been reading Jacobs’ blog for a while and it’s good, as was this book — in particular, I liked the temporal bandwidth idea and the acknowledgment that the past is strange. “These are the writers who help us to encounter our ancestors not as anthropological curiosities whom we observe from a critical distance, but as those with whom we can, and should, break bread.” I need to read more old books, and study more history.
Slow Productivity, by Cal Newport, published 2024. Some good ideas and anecdotes in here. The core message — do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality — resonated with me.
Fiction
The Giver of Stars, by Jojo Moyes, published 2019, historical fiction. I read this for book group. Enjoyed it more than I was expecting to. (Until recently, my interest levels in historical fiction have been fairly low.)
Penric’s Demon, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 2015, fantasy. Liked it a lot, as with pretty much all her books and especially the World of the Five Gods series. Looking forward to the rest of the Penric stories.
Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch, published 2013, fantasy. Rivers of London book 4. A bit earthy as usual, but other than that, liked it as usual. And that twist at the end!
