Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent into Vietnam, by Brian VanDeMark, published 2018, history, 763 pages. Really liked it. It’s a history of Vietnam up until LBJ leaves office, including a bit at the beginning on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis (useful context for the early decisions both Kennedy and McNamara were making), looking in particular at the various cognitive blind spots that led smart people to make poor decisions throughout the war. Recommended. Also: war is evil.

Père Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac, published 1835, translated 1890s by Ellen Marriage, fiction, 383 pages. My first time reading Balzac. Shallow society, lots of unhappy marriages and surface-level affairs. And yet in spite of all that (which to be fair is only a small part of the novel), I quite liked the book and found myself looking forward to picking it up again each day. I don’t know that I’ll read his whole Human Comedy — there are a lot of volumes — but a few more, certainly.

Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, published 2007, biography, 684 pages. Quite good. Compelling and readable. Bronson was an odd character, egotistical (“my genius is epic” — who says that?!) and weird (the whole Fruitlands episode, for example), with some obsessive journaling on parenthood. “Bronson desperately wanted to cure Louisa’s seemingly innate violence. In his records, he fretted endlessly over her fierce will and volcanic temper.” She was two or three at the time, if I recall correctly. Ha. Emerson and Thoreau show up fairly often, which was fun. On the less fun side of things, I hadn’t known about Louisa’s disability and health issues that seriously affected her last couple decades. Another casualty of the Civil War. And of course it was interesting to see which parts of Little Women were more autobiographical. Speaking of that and, more candidly, of the trail of deaths of her family toward the end of the book: biographies often leave me with a feeling I don’t get from any other kind of book, the feeling that a friend has died.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by Elizabeth Gaskell (who was six years older than Charlotte and was her friend), published 1857, biography, 684 pages. So good. Tragedy after tragedy, though, with her mother dying at age 39, her two oldest sisters dying at ages 11 and 12, and then, later on, Branwell, Emily, and Anne all dying within eight months of each other at ages 31, 30, and 29, and Charlotte herself dying a few years after that at age 38 while pregnant. The father outlived them all and made it to age 84. A family haunted by death. My wife’s ancestors, by the way, were from Keighley and Haworth, and we visited Haworth as a family a few years ago, so it was fun to read about it. Except that Haworth back then was a bit of a death trap: “And thus we find that illness often assumed a low typhoid form in Haworth, and fevers of various kinds visited the place with sad frequency.” The autobiographical elements of Jane Eyre were striking — I didn’t realize Helen Burns was basically her older sister Maria. Or how her father’s near-blindness and her own extreme nearsightedness surely led to all the references to sight and eyes. The biography includes lots of letters, which I found very effective in drawing me into Charlotte’s world. Some passages that give a feel for the book, and the first two are Charlotte’s words:

A bereavement of this kind gives one a glimpse of the feeling those must have, who have seen all drop round them—friend after friend, and are left to end their pilgrimage alone.

And:

For my part, I am free to walk on the moors; but when I go out there alone, everything reminds me of the times when others were with me, and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion, and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency, but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness, nor witnessed their last moments: it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning. At the end of all, however, exists the Great Hope. Eternal Life is theirs now.

And:

Some one conversing with her once objected, in my presence, to that part of Jane Eyre in which she hears Rochester’s voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë’s recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, “But it is a true thing; it really happened.”

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Foster, by Claire Keegan, published 2010, fiction, 34 pages. I normally try not to read books from the same author in such close temporal proximity, but this came in on hold and it’s so short. (I love short books.) (I also love long books.) (I just really love books.) Keegan’s writing continues to bewitch my brain.

Penric’s Fox, by Lois McMaster Bujold, published 2017, fantasy, 144 pages. Part of the Penric & Desdemona series. A murder mystery this time, and I liked it a lot, as always with Bujold.

Piers Plowman, by William Langland, published 1370s, poetry, 337 pages. I read this in Middle English (which I took a class in back in my undergrad days) with no aids, to see what it would be like. While it was fun, I sadly came out of it retaining very little, even though at the line level I kept feeling like I was comprehending everything well enough. I’ve also learned that allegories are not really my thing. Loved the crazy Middle English orthographic diversity and the utter avalanche of biblical Latin quotes, though.

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The Old Regime and the Revolution, by Alexis de Tocqueville (translated by Henry Reeve), published 1856 (translation published 1873), history, 410 pages. An analysis of the causes of the French Revolution and a thesis that the revolution perhaps didn’t reform French political institutions as much as people may have thought. Fascinating and readable. Felt surprisingly contemporary, too, with passages like these: “And it may be said with strict accuracy that the taste a man may show for absolute government bears an exact ratio to the contempt he may profess for his countrymen.” And: “Since the object of taxation was not to include those most able to pay taxes, but those least able to defend themselves from paying, the monstrous consequence was brought about that the rich were exempted and the poor burdened.” All too familiar. And: “The men of the eighteenth century knew little of that sort of passion for comfort which is the mother of servitude.” Looking forward to reading Democracy in America.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake, published 2020, science, 340 pages. The first part felt like a constant stream of fascinating facts ala An Immense World, with nuggets like this: “According to some estimates, if one teased apart the mycelium found in a gram of soil—about a teaspoon—and laid it end to end, it could stretch anywhere from a hundred meters to ten kilometers.” And this: “One study estimated that if a hypha was as wide as a human hand, it would be able to lift an eight-ton school bus.” And especially this: “Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top ten centimeters of soil is around half the width of our galaxy.” Whew! Also, lichens are surprisingly interesting. But alas, towards the end the book went off into magic mushrooms and brewing alcohol and I completely lost interest. I do still very much recommend the first part, though.

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, published 2021, historical fiction, 47 pages. Somber yet human and ultimately hopeful. I found the prose bewitching in ways I still don’t understand but which left me wanting to read more Keegan. (Which — spoiler alert — I’ve already done. This is what happens when I’m perpetually behind on writing up these booknotes.)

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The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, published 1922, fiction, 299 pages. I loved it! Delightful, witty, well-wrought, and the voice was a great fit for me. Very much looking forward to reading all the rest of von Arnim’s books. Her Vera was apparently an inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I still haven’t read but need to.

Truth Has a Power of Its Own: Conversations About A People’s History, by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez, published 2022, history, 155 pages. I would rather know the truth even if it’s ugly, and I have zero interest in whitewashing history to be more palatable, but whew, this book ended up being depressing and deflating, because the actual history is depressing and deflating. Greed continues to wreak havoc throughout the human story. Slavery: bad. Wealth disparity: bad. War: bad. Speaking of which, here are a few war-related passages from the book that resonated with me: “War is terrorism on a very large scale.” “I came to the conclusion that war itself should not be tolerated, not even a so-called Good War, not even a war against an evil enemy. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of innocent people, and I don’t think it can be morally justified.” “We can no longer accept war as a way of solving problems. In fact, you might say that this is the great challenge before the human race in our time: how to solve problems of tyranny, aggression, and injustice without killing huge numbers of people.” Hear, hear.

Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell, published 2017, biography, 940 pages. I really liked this and recommend it for those interested in political biographies. It’s readable and seemed reasonably evenhanded, at least as far as I could tell — I went into it not liking Nixon at all but came out with more understanding and compassion, even if I still disagree with much of what Nixon did. (I also don’t think every book needs to be evenhanded; there’s value in reading books from other perspectives.) The Chambers/Hess part was particularly compelling for me and I’m looking forward to reading Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers.

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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.)

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The Two Gentlemen of Verona, by William Shakespeare, published 1594, play, 68 pages. Possibly the first of Shakespeare’s plays. His comedies don’t appeal to me anywhere near as much as his tragedies (have I said this before? I probably have and probably will again), but I’m on a quest to read all of his plays and I’d still say I enjoyed this one.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, by Karen Hao, published 2025, history, 426 pages. A morbidly fascinating history of OpenAI from the angle of oh wow, this company is swallowing up resources like one of the colonial empires that wrought so much suffering and destruction. It made me, if such a thing can be believed, want to use AI even less. Also, Sam Altman really, really is not trustworthy. Goodness. While the book is fine (I recommend it), I’m glad to be done with it so I can get back to spending less time thinking about AI and the slimy corporations spray-painting the world with it.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson, published 2002, fiction, 114 pages. So. Much. Death. (For a novella, anyway.) I don’t inherently mind bleak books drenched in death, but I don’t think I liked this one, reasonably well written though it was. Not sure why. I’m aware of the film, by the way, but haven’t seen it, so I don’t know how it compares.

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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, published 2006, history, 416 pages. Whew, that was harrowing — all the more so because the tragedy was avoidable, if only they’d known what they were doing. For me, the whole thing was a strong warning against having a careless relationship with the earth, and a reminder that there are better, healthier ways to meet our human needs without plundering and savaging this precious world we live in. Greed continues to ruin everything, as always.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, by Brian Merchant, published 2023, history, 561 pages. An important book, and one that feels particularly relevant right now, at least to me, as I watch my chosen industry mutating in ways I find reprehensible. I am a Luddite in spirit. Enjoyed the interwoven literary angle — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Lord Byron — and reading about George IV as prince regent shortly after reading Greville’s memoirs, and about Mary Wollstonecraft shortly after reading Godwin’s biography. I like making things and I’ve found factories interesting from that perspective, but the human cost doesn’t seem worth it to me — the horrendous working conditions, the effects on the workers they replace, etc. There must be a better way. From the book:

But it is much more absurd to pretend there are no possible alternative arrangements—to think that technology, the product of concerted human invention and innovation, can only be introduced to society through reckless disruption, or that it’s unthinkable that advancements in technology might be integrated into our lives democratically and with care. If we are ingenious enough to automate large-scale production, build spacecraft, and invent artificial intelligences, are we not ingenious enough to ensure that advancing technology benefits all, and not just a few?

Stoner, by John Williams, published 1965, fiction, 219 pages. This has nothing to do with drugs, and no, not that John Williams. This is the fictional biography (a form I love) of an English professor in the first half of the twentieth century. Other than the earthy parts, I found it compelling even in its mundanity, though happy it is not. Humanity is messy. In the course of reading it I realized it was making me want to be a compassionate person, one who builds up those whose paths I cross in life. (I don’t remember what it was about the book that spawned those feelings, though.)

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There never was such a man, or behaviour so atrocious as his—a mixture of narrow-mindedness, selfishness, truckling, blustering, and duplicity, with no object but self, his own ease, and the gratification of his own fancies and prejudices, without regard to the advice and opinion of the wisest and best informed men or to the interests and tranquillity of the country.

Also:

Objects which I used to contemplate at an immeasurable distance, and to attain which I thought would be the summit of felicity, I have found worth very little in comparison to the value my imagination used to set upon them.

And:

Three days ago Lord Liverpool was seized with an apoplectic or paralytic attack. The moment it was known every sort of speculation was afloat as to the probable changes this event would make in the Ministry. It was remarked how little anybody appeared to care about the man; whether this indifference reflects most upon the world or upon him, I do not pretend to say.

Very much looking forward to reading the remaining volumes.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, published 1963, fiction, 259 pages. Oof. I picked this up because I liked Plath’s poetry and maybe also as a small attempt to try to better understand my father’s suicide. The writing was indeed great, but whew, the second half was kind of brutal for me.

Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel, published 1999, biography, 405 pages. I quite liked this, which is no huge surprise given how much I love reading about the history of science. It’s a biography of Galileo’s adult life, with lots of letters from his oldest daughter (a nun at a nearby convent) interleaved with the narrative, which covers Galileo’s research in astronomy and physics and of course the infamous trial. Reading this book made me realize I don’t spend nearly enough time actively thinking, or at least I don’t feel I do, which likely means instead that I’m not thinking about the things I wish I were. This passage is good:

“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation,” Galileo continued his letter to Castelli, “such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen, published 1811, fiction, 456 pages. Delightful and witty. Loved it. I’d seen some of the film adaptations before but had never read the book till now, and that was entirely my loss. Of Austen’s novels, I have left only Emma and Mansfield Park, and I look forward to completing the set in the not too distant future.

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The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410, by Iris Origo, published 1957, biography, 526 pages. Enjoyed this deep dive into the life of a medieval Tuscan merchant. Very detailed, thanks to Datini’s voluminous correspondence. Recommended if you’re into 1300s Tuscany, as I am. The preface includes this gem about the author:

The illegibility of her handwriting was also notorious. Her publisher and friend Jock Murray tells of tackling a passage at the bottom of a letter, which had defeated everyone else, and eventually deciphering the words: “Dearest Jock, I can’t read what I have written. Please type it out and send a copy to me.”

And this, from Petrarch, on doctors back then (glad things have changed!):

No one heeded their prescriptions, for I have always besought my friends and bidden my servants that nothing should ever be carried out on my person of what physicians had ordered, but that, if indeed something must be done, it should be just the opposite.

Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy, by Joyce Vance, published 2025, nonfiction, 168 pages. I’ve occasionally dipped into Vance’s newsletter for legal analysis on the criminal embarrassment that is Trump and his incompetent administration and all their unconstitutional mayhem, and her newsletter is solid. This book is likewise good, though it doesn’t have much legal analysis; it does, however, review Trump’s current attempts to destroy our democracy and turn himself into a vainglorious dictator, and it has recommendations for how to preserve our freedom. It’s about how rule of law and democracy are our best defense against the capricious, arbitrary whims of a tyrant, things we in America once again have firsthand knowledge of (re: Iran, tariffs, etc.). The book also points out (or maybe it’s just something I thought while reading it; I can’t remember) that anyone who is actively trying to make it harder for Americans to vote (cough SAVE Act cough) is fundamentally anti-American and an enemy of democracy.

The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, published 1353 (translation by John Payne published 1886), fiction, 1,075 pages. What a bawdy, bawdy book. I found it repugnant, though near the end there were a couple very refreshing stories where someone chooses not to be immoral. (Shocking!) While I was in the middle of this, we came to Genesis 39 in our family scripture study and that too was a glorious breath of fresh air. I did enjoy the conclusion, where Boccaccio tries to defend his work against the objections he was sure were coming. All in all, I’m glad I read this for the sake of becoming better versed in medieval lit, but whew, never going to read it again. Also, incessant vice is boring.

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