More reading this time round, because yours truly finally picked up Covid nine days ago. (We weren’t sure it was Covid at first, though, because we tested negative early on. For a while it seemed like just an obnoxious cold after all, but then on Friday I started getting waves of metallic-tasting nausea and that was weird enough to get me to test again.) We’re doing fine — my wife and kids have all fully recovered, and I just have some lingering fatigue along with the occasional metallic taste.
I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned this, by the way, but I try to be pretty non-spoilery in these reviews (if you can even call them that — they’re more microreactions, at least in my mind). Thus the typical dearth of detail about any given book.
Recent nonfiction reads
- Attention Factory, by Matthew Brennan. I might not have been the audience for this one. Mild anthropological curiosity led me to it (I don’t use TikTok and what I’ve seen of it is so not me), but it turned out to not be all that interesting. The writing, too, was a bit too lackluster and dull for my taste. Given how little I care for social media and surveillance capitalism, I have no idea why I finished the book.
- The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert. Loved this book. So good. The core message was of course more on the depressing side (what kind of starkly different world will our grandchildren inherit?), but pretty much every chapter was riveting to me. I seriously love reading about the history of science.
- The Plantagenets, by Dan Jones. Also really good. I admittedly abandoned it for months because I was having trouble keeping track of all the names, but serializing my nonfiction reading (back down to one book at a time) worked, as did slowing down and subvocalizing. This book is quite readable and I very much enjoyed it. Though the endless wars did get a bit tiresome. (For me, peacetime is much more interesting to read about.) Anyway, looking forward to reading Jones’ book on the Tudors.
- On Reading, by Nick Parker. Super short, and maybe not expanded as much from his blog post as I’d prefer, but overall I liked it. The paper museum idea is intriguing. And the typesetting of the interior made me happy.
- The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, by Louise Perry. An uncomfortable book that describes some atrocious, awful, heartbreaking things. But an important book nonetheless, I think. I found it interesting to read a secular take on the subject — one that doesn’t fully line up with the law of chastity we have in the Church, but a little more aligned than the sexual revolution itself is (which is admittedly not hard to do). The last chapter is less dismal, but I’d still make sure to read something happy after this.
Recent fiction reads
- Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo. Dark and rough and creepy, with some super uncomfortable parts. But overall, ignoring those bits, I liked the book.
Recent nonfiction reads
- A New Foreign Policy, by Jeffrey D. Sachs. A bit dry at times, but I learned a decent amount and agreed with the majority of what he says. I’m all for global cooperation as opposed to insidious American exceptionalism. Also, I hadn’t realized how much regime change we’ve forced on the world, how many wars we’ve started for no good reason. America is a troubled country in a lot of ways. (This is something I’ve been gradually realizing over the past few years as I’ve begun reading more history.)
- The Wizard of Lies, by Diana B. Henriques. I came into this not knowing really anything about Bernie Madoff or even about the 2008 financial crisis (I wasn’t paying any attention to either when they happened). Initially the financial stuff was near incomprehensible and I came quite close to shelving the book, but I stuck with it and it ended up being fine in the end. A sad story, though.
Recent fiction reads
- Prosper’s Demon, by K. J. Parker. Novella. Good. Didn’t see the end coming. Someday I’ll try Parker’s Tom Holt novels and see if they’re my style, because his Parker work really does suit me. Looking forward to reading A Practical Guide to Conquering the World to finish off the Siege trilogy.
- The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, by Garth Nix. Enjoyed it a lot. I still haven’t read his Old Kingdom series yet, need to add it to my ever-long TBR list.
Books purchased since last post
- To Ride Hell’s Chasm — Janny Wurts
- Good Omens — Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
- Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service — Carol Leonnig
- Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis — Guy Snodgrass
- Iron Truth — S. A. Tholin
- The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything — Matthew Ball
- Risen — Benedict Jacka
- Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy — Nathaniel Philbrick
- The Last Viking: The True Story of King Harald Hardrada — Don Hollway
- Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race — Tim Fernholz
- The Return of Fitzroy Angursell — Victoria Goddard
- The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul — Victoria Goddard
- Petty Treasons — Victoria Goddard
- Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander — Victoria Goddard
- Terec and the Wild — Victoria Goddard
- The Tower at the Edge of the World — Victoria Goddard
- Aurelius (to be called) Magnus — Victoria Goddard
- Anno Dracula — Kim Newman
- 1812: The Navy’s War — George C Daughan
- If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy—from the Revolution to the War of 1812 — George C Daughan
- The Dawn’s Early Light: The War of 1812 — Walter Lord
- Belladonna Nights and Other Stories — Alastair Reynolds
- The Wizard’s Butler — Nathan Lowell
- The Bride of the Blue Wind — Victoria Goddard
- The Warrior of the Third Veil — Victoria Goddard
- Stargazy Pie — Victoria Goddard
- Bee Sting Cake — Victoria Goddard
- Whiskeyjack — Victoria Goddard
- Blackcurrant Fool — Victoria Goddard
- Love-in-a-Mist — Victoria Goddard
- Plum Duff — Victoria Goddard
- Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia — Anne Garrels
- The Aeneid — Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch
- Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages — Gaston Dorren
- A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis: Boston 1850–1900 — Stephen Puleo
- Dune Omnibus: Books 1–3 — Frank Herbert
- Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions — Michael Moss
- Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable — Jeffrey D. Sachs
- Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City — Samira Shackle
- Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance — Matthew Brennan
- 14 — Peter Clines
- Till Human Voices Wake Us — Victoria Goddard
- In the Company of Gentlemen — Victoria Goddard
- Stone Speaks to Stone — Victoria Goddard
- In the Realms of Gold — Victoria Goddard
- The Seven Brides-to-Be of Generalissimo Vlad — Victoria Goddard
Guess whose book I’ve been reading and loving.
I’ve been reading more on my Kobo lately, after barely touching it for months. The contrast and typography are great. The physical buttons end up hurting my fingers a little, though, so I’ve just been using the touchscreen. (Honestly, I’d prefer it without the buttons, for my fingers and for the sake of symmetry. If/when Kobo releases a new Clara with the Carta 1200 screen, I’m absolutely planning to switch.)
Recent nonfiction reads
- The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf. About the life of Alexander von Humboldt, who I had somehow never heard of before reading this. Glad to have corrected that. The book also ended up being about a number of other men (Bolívar, Darwin, Thoreau, Marsh, Haeckel, Muir, etc.), which I hadn’t expected but which turned out to be fascinating. Loved it.
- Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World, by Philip Matyszak. A nice overview of dozens of ancient groups like the Akkadians, the Hyksos, the Phrygians, the Bactrians, the Epirots, the Celtiberians, the Catuvellauni, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, and the Hephthalites. About five or six pages per group. It was slower reading because of all the ancient names (Magetobriga, Vercingetorix, Sarmizegetusa, etc.), but it was good. So much human history, and I still know so very little of it.
Recent fiction reads
- Sourdough, by Robin Sloan. Really liked it. A bit zany at times, but lots of heart. And yes, it did get me itching to make sourdough bread.
Books purchased since last post
- The Past Is Red — Catherynne M. Valente
- Troubleshooting Your Novel: Essential Techniques for Identifying and Solving Manuscript Problems — Steven James
- Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy — Jamie Raskin
- In Theory, It Works — Raymond St. Elmo
- The Crook Factory — Dan Simmons
- The Secret Lives of Color — Kassia St. Clair
- Cuba: An American History — Ada Ferrer
- Hench — Natalie Zina Walschots
- The Secrets of Alchemy — Lawrence M. Principe
- Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution — Nathaniel Philbrick
- Geography Is Destiny: Britain and the World: A 10,000-Year History — Ian Morris
- Desdemona and the Deep — C. S. E. Cooney
- Dark Breakers — C. S. E. Cooney
- Legend — David Gemmell
- The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger — Stephen King
- Sweet Harmony — Claire North
- A Canticle for Leibowitz — Walter M. Miller, Jr.
- The Wandering Earth — Cixin Liu
- A Ghost in the Throat — Doireann Ní Ghríofa
- Thunderstruck — Erik Larson
- A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism — Jeffrey D. Sachs
- The Gormenghast Trilogy — Mervyn Peake
- The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible — Simon Winchester
- Battle for the Big Top: P. T. Barnum, James Bailey, John Ringling, and the Death-Defying Saga of the American Circus — Les Standiford
- It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels — Robert Penn
- Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag — Orlando Figes
- The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust — Diana B. Henriques
- Five Days in London, May 1940 — John Lukacs
- To Say Nothing of the Dog — Connie Willis
- Blackout — Connie Willis
- All Clear — Connie Willis
- How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World — Steven Johnson
- Battle of the Linguist Mages — Scotto Moore
- The Ninth Rain — Jen Williams
- Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar — Simon Sebag Montefiore
Oh how I wish I could read them as fast as I buy them.
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
For those who feel inclined to reply via email: what was the best book you read this year? Any genre.
Things I’ve found helpful when reading hard/old books:
- Slow down
- Speed up
- Read out loud (or subvocalize)
- Make the font larger (or zoom in, or move the book closer)
Rachel Smith on code-first vs. product-first engineers. I read this a few weeks ago and it’s been simmering in the back of my head since then.
Dan McKinley on boring technology. I’ve also been thinking about this a lot, primarily with respect to the technologies I use to build my personal projects.
Robin Sloan on permacomputing. The long-term durability of our current technologies — or lack thereof — is also something I think about fairly often. Nice to see movement in that direction.
Ada Palmer on disability. Resonated a lot with me.
Clive Thompson on nine ways to rewild your attention. Good suggestions. I particularly like the one about randomly reading old books.