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.
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
Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong. A variety of essays, with varying levels of interest. Overall, it was a quick read that I learned a lot from. The idea of disability being time travel (making your body act much older or much younger) resonated with me; I’ve certainly felt like my spondylolisthesis has aged me thirty years. While it’s invisible to anyone looking at me, it affects my life every day, all day long. (It’s very rare for an hour to go by without the pain drawing my attention.) Anyway, this was the first book I’ve read about disability since my injury, and some of the essays definitely felt like they were speaking to me.
Recent fiction reads
The Sudden Appearance of Hope, by Claire North. I think this was maybe my second favorite of hers so far, after Harry August. An interesting science fiction idea (a girl who everyone forgets) with intriguing exploration of the potential ramifications, which is what I like out of science fiction. (Or at least one thing I like out of science fiction.)
Devolution, by Max Brooks. Sasquatch horror. Quite violent in some respects, but overall a captivating story. I liked it more than World War Z, which felt more exhausting to me. Even so, I’m very, very glad this book was fictional.
Upgrade, by Blake Crouch. Another interesting science fiction idea (which comes enough into the book that I won’t spoil it, even though it’s somewhat self-evident and probably all over the back cover copy). During the middle I wasn’t sure how I felt about the book, but the ending turned it around for me in a good way. Also one that I’m glad was fictional.
Books purchased since last post
Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World — Adam Tooze
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story — Christina Thompson
The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy — Paige Williams
The Last Lie Told — Debra Webb
Churchill & Son — Josh Ireland
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body — Neil Shubin
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory — Ben Macintyre
The Law — Jim Butcher
Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence — Joseph J. Ellis
The Immortal King Rao — Vauhini Vara
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday — Saad Z. Hossain
Knives at Dawn: America’s Quest for Culinary Glory at the Legendary Bocuse d’Or Competition — Andrew Friedman
Stet: An Editor’s Life — Diana Athill
The Story of Greece and Rome — Tony Spawforth
Trust: America’s Best Chance — Pete Buttigieg
Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer — Steven Johnson
The Hand of the Sun King — J. T. Greathouse
Upgrade — Blake Crouch
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words — Eddie Robson
Inda — Sherwood Smith
The Immortal Game: A History of Chess — David Shenk
Stray Souls — Kate Griffin
The Glass God — Kate Griffin
Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir — Marie Yovanovitch
Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life — David Treuer
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
This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein. An unexpectedly pivotal book for me. I hadn’t paid much attention to climate change before this, other than noticing more frequent extreme weather events. I wish things weren’t the way they are. I wish we had a healthier relationship with the earth. I now have even less patience for unregulated capitalism. (Selfishness is supposed to save the world? Sheesh.) Anyway, the book was occasionally slow reading but overall it was good and important.
Building Ligatures, by TypeTogether. A pleasant history of TypeTogether and some basics of type design and typography. Nice overviews of some different scripts, too. The overall theme was working together to make things better, which was a nice followup to the suggestions in This Changes Everything.
The Last Nomad, by Shugri Said Salh. What a wildly different life she’s had. (She was a Somali nomad, though that’s only the first third or so of the book.) It definitely expanded my horizons and was worth reading. The FGM part was infuriating and so, so sad.
Recent fiction reads
All Our Wrong Todays, by Elan Mastai. Loved it. Some parts I think could have been glossed over or removed, but as a whole, I thought it did several interesting things with the time travel conceit. Especially near the end. Whew.
The Imaginary Corpse, by Tyler Hayes. The POV character is a stuffed yellow triceratops. At first the setting wasn’t really working for me and I almost gave up, but once it got into the mystery, I was fine. A little weird. (Which is what fantasy is good at.)
Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells. Novella. Sad to come to the current end of the Murderbot series, but she’s under contract for a couple more novellas and another novel, I believe (according to a recent AMA on Reddit), so that’s nice.
Books acquired since last post
Cloud Atlas — David Mitchell
Dispatches — Michael Herr
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind — Alan Jacobs
Verdigris Deep — Frances Hardinge
The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House — John F. Harris
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together — Heather McGhee
Spirits of Vengeance — Rob J. Hayes
Smoke and Stone — Michael R. Fletcher
Queenslayer — Sebastien de Castell
Crownbreaker — Sebastien de Castell
Subway: The Curiosities, Secrets, and Unofficial History of the New York City Transit System — John E. Morris
More Songwriters on Songwriting — Paul Zollo
Dark Sea’s End — Richard Nell
James Baldwin: A Biography — David Adams Leeming
The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir — Steffanie Strathdee, Thomas Patterson
The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization — Paul Strathern
Bone Swans: Stories — C. S. E. Cooney
The God Is Not Willing — Steven Erikson
Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest — Stephen E. Ambrose
A History of Food in 100 Recipes — William Sitwell
The Restaurant: A 2,000-Year History of Dining Out — William Sitwell
The Infiltrator: The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History — Robert Mazur
The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity — Nancy Gibbs, Michael Duffy
How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir — Hans Rosling
The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong — Eric Barker
Hild — Nicola Griffith
Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature — Zibby Owens
The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire — Francesca Cartier Brickell
Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England — Amanda Vickery
The Field of Cloth of Gold — Glenn Richardson
The Elements We Live By: How Iron Helps Us Breathe, Potassium Lets Us See, and Other Surprising Superpowers of the Periodic Table — Anja Røyne
The Puzzler, by A. J. Jacobs. A fun book. I don’t really do puzzles myself anymore (my brain doesn’t like it), but I enjoyed reading about all the different kinds.
Recent fiction reads
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Loved it. It took me a little while to warm up to it, but once the fantasy elements were introduced, I was there. Glad that there are two more novels and a lot of Penric novellas to come. (Plus the remaining Vorkosigan books I haven’t yet read, and the Sharing Knife series.)
Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire. Novella. Mixed feelings. It was unexpectedly sad to me, but the world seems interesting enough (portal fantasies are my thing) and I liked Middlegame (looking forward to picking up Seasonal Fears soon), so I think I’ll still try the next in the series.
Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor. Novella. Loved it. I really like Afrofuturism. Looking forward to the other Binti novellas and Okorafor’s other work.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. Novella. I almost gave up on this a couple times early on, but it got more interesting once things started happening and I’m glad I stuck with it. Fairly philosophical. The permacomputing was nice to see, too.
A Warning to the Curious, by M. R. James. Basically a novella. Published in the 1920s. I don’t know that I felt particularly engaged (or scared) by the stories, but it was good to read something older.
A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow. Novella. Really liked it, especially the voice. And the intersection of fairy tales and modern people? Also my thing. (Which reminds me that I want to reread OSC’s Enchantment sometime.)
Books acquired since last post
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story — Michael Lewis
A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich — Christopher B. Krebs
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire — David Remnick
Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past — Andrew Albin et al.
Skyward Inn — Aliya Whiteley
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City — Andrea Elliott
Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion — Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Bob Andelman
Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy — Tim Weiner, David Johnston, and Neil A. Lewis
The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism — Dean Starkman
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath — Heather L. Clark
Black Stone Heart — Michael R. Fletcher
The Sisters Brothers — Patrick deWitt
The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community — Mary Pipher
After this issue, I’m going to split Prints up and go back to more of a normal blog format. I’ll still be posting the same content, just not consolidated into a single issue. (Though I do look forward to using the issue format again for something in the future.)
Reading
Recent nonfiction reads
Saints, volume 2. This took me a year or so, reading just on Sundays and only a few pages at a time. (I wanted to take it slow so that I’d finish around the time the third volume came out.) Loved it. Great series. Can’t wait to see how it ends!
The End Is Always Near, by Dan Carlin. I’m not a podcast person and haven’t listened to Hardcore History, but a couple people recommended this to me. Really liked it. This is the kind of thing I think about frequently. Also, the pandemic part was bittersweet (okay, mostly bitter) reading in light of Covid. (The book was published in October 2019.) That said, while Covid is certainly awful, I’m glad it’s not as graphic as some of the other plagues humanity has experienced.
Scotland’s Merlin, by Tim Clarkson. A look at the historical evidence for Merlin being from Scotland instead of Wales. (Spoiler alert: there’s fairly little evidence for anything at all from the sixth century A.D.) Enjoyed it, even if it felt occasionally repetitive. Also, did you know there’s a Myrddin programming language?
Recent fiction reads:
Vita Nostra, by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Another weird, mind-bending novel, this one in a Russian magic college of sorts. I think I liked it, maybe? (Though I wouldn’t say it was among my favorite magic school novels.) Sergey died two days ago, by the way.
Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson. Some parts I could do without, but Stephenson’s writing really clicks with me. Looking forward to reading the rest of his books (even if most of them are on the long end).
Books acquired since last issue
City of Bones — Martha Wells
The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life — A.J. Jacobs
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America — Carrie Gibson
Reign & Ruin — J. D. Evans
The Atlas Six — Olivie Blake
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx — Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia — Orlando Figes
The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution — Barbara W. Tuchman
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures — Bill Schutt
Montaigne — Stefan Zweig
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers — Tom Standage
Empire of Cotton: A Global History — Sven Beckert
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction — Alec Nevala-Lee
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century — Steve Coll
Young Stalin — Simon Sebag Montefiore
Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman—from World War to Cold War — Michael Dobbs
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness — Russell D. Roberts
The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton — Jefferson Morley
The Last Nomad: Coming of Age in the Somali Desert — Shugri Said Salh
The Business of Tomorrow: The Visionary Life of Harry Guggenheim: From Aviation and Rocketry to the Creation of an Art Dynasty — Dirk Smillie
Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture — Emma Dabiri
Here Is Real Magic: A Magician’s Search for Wonder in the Modern World — Nate Staniforth
On Assignment: Memoir of a National Geographic Filmmaker — James R. Larison
Cage of Souls — Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Devil You Know — K. J. Parker
The Last Witness — K. J. Parker
Miracles — C. S. Lewis
The Man Burned by Winter — Pete Zacharias
Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South’s Ancient Chiefdoms — Charles Hudson
Seasonal Fears — Seanan McGuire
Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across North America — Jack Nisbet
Making
Releases
New story: “A Past Not Yet Forgotten.” This is the Retzi story I’ve mentioned before. Fantasy, about ten pages long. The form is a little experimental — for me, anyway.
And we have more art, this time a handful of illusions and a Blender piece. (Sidenote: for my non-religious art, I’ve decided to only post it here and not to Instagram or Facebook anymore.)
Penrose A. I wanted to take the SVG techniques I’ve been using lately and try them on a Penrose triangle. Voila. With this variation I was going for more of an inky look.Penrose B. With this one, I was aiming for a more chaotic watercolor look. The lighting is intentionally different from that in A and C.Penrose C. With this I was trying to get an old-book feel.Café Wall A. Another illusion piece, for fun. Whenever I’ve seen illusions like these, by the way, they’ve almost always been in black and white with crisp linework. I’ve enjoyed making more artistic versions. If you know of any other illusions you think might work with my style, let me know!The Floating City. Not an illusion! Made in Blender with some lightweight Python scripting to generate the meshes. Used a random Gaussian distribution for the location and height of the buildings, which are just five-sided cylinders. Applied the texture in a postprocessing pass. (The fog was in the original render, though. Mmm. Instant drama.)
Current projects
Dagh (working title): Another fantasy story. I originally started writing this five or six years ago, but this iteration only shares a couple characters’ names. The outline is done and I have four pages written.
Religious art: Feeling blocked at the moment.
I’m figuring things out re: other projects. My back and neck haven’t been great lately, and I’ve still been dealing with eyestrain issues and resultant headaches. (I want to draw, for example, but my neck issues have made that prohibitively painful.) This may end up being a season mostly for writing and reading, since those are comparatively painless at the moment.
Tom Critchlow on triple-entry blogging. I still need to move my site over to a fully static site. (It used to be. I’ve gone back and forth over the years.)
Thoughts
Found last week that I’ve been pronouncing ophthalmologist wrong all my life, by saying “opp” at the beginning instead of “off.”
The live view in Find My [Friends; leaving it objectless makes my brain sad] in iOS 15 feels like magic. I somehow hadn’t heard about it when it came out and ended up accidentally discovering it when my wife upgraded her phone recently. We’re living in the future. (Though I’ve been reading This Changes Everything lately and I don’t know if the future is worth the cost we’re paying for it.)
We’ve started watching Old Enough on Netflix and it’s adorable.
The Last American Aristocrat, by David S. Brown. Confession: I went into this thinking it was about Henry James. No. It’s about Henry Adams (grandson of John Quincy Adams), who I knew nothing about beforehand. It ended up being a much slower read, I believe because its prose was dense and less scannable. There were also some mildly confusing time jumps. Overall, though, I liked it and I’m glad I read it. Learned a lot about the late 1800s and early 1900s. Also picked up the word filiopietistic.
Recent fiction reads:
Network Effect, by Martha Wells. The full-length Murderbot novel. Really liked it. It was more horror in some ways, but still a comfort read. I’m going to be sad when I read Fugitive Telemetry and run out of Murderbot.
Books acquired since last issue
Shakespeare: The Biography — Peter Ackroyd
The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco — Marilyn Chase
First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance — Annie Jacobsen
Heir to the Empire — Timothy Zahn
Dark Force Rising — Timothy Zahn
The Last Command — Timothy Zahn
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death — Caitlin Doughty
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate — Naomi Klein
A Victorian Lady’s Guide to Fashion and Beauty — Mimi Matthews
Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power — James McGrath Morris
Emerson: The Mind on Fire — Robert D. Richardson
Part-Time Gods — Rachel Aaron
Night Shift Dragons — Rachel Aaron
Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities — Craig Steven Wilder
An Eye for an Eye — Carol Wyer
The Puma Years: A Memoir — Laura Coleman
The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America — James Bamford
The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens—and Ourselves — Arik Kershenbaum
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found — Suketu Mehta
The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth — Richard Conniff
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence — Christian Parenti
The City We Became — N. K. Jemisin
The Great Fossil Enigma: The Search for the Conodont Animal — Simon J. Knell
Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation — Anton Howes
Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle — Clare Hunter
Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages — Dan Jones
Making
Releases
Some religious art:
When Our Heavenly Parents We Meet II. More in the zoomed-in negative-space vein. I like how it feels more intimate and personal.Why Weepest Thou? II. I know, I know, it also looks like a) an old floppy disk or b) a headphone-wearing creature with an open mouth which bears resemblance to my Nom Nom painting. Turns out these negative-space pieces end up looking like other things half the time.By the Laying on of Hands III. Going back to full bleed. In hindsight, this maybe feels a little too zoomed-in to me.My Yoke Is Easy II. More in the newer style. Not sure how I feel about this one, though. Also feels a bit too zoomed-in.By the Laying on of Hands IV. This is basically the same as the other. Felt like doing it at the time, now second guessing that decision. If it’s not yet clear, I have a complicated relationship with some of the pieces I make.I Am a Child of God III. Inordinately pleased with the painterly look of the background. The mult-layer SVG technique is a new favorite for sure. This piece also looks to me like a crazed fox wearing a white-collared shirt and red robes. These are the perils of negative-space art!
Current projects
Retzi (working title): Ten minutes a day is still working spectacularly well, and I’m making good if slow progress. The first draft of this story is done (it’s only five pages), just need to do a final editing pass. Expect it next time!
Religious art: Got burned out on this and planned to take a long break, but that didn’t last. Thinking about using Blender more for texturing, like I did with Within the Walls of Your Own Homes, using both displacement/bump maps and sculpting. But I also really like the SVG techniques I’ve been using lately, so we’ll see.
Picture book: Haven’t really done much of anything on this (soon to be a common theme). Thinking about using the multi-layer SVG technique for the art.
Shadow art: Nothing to report.
Type design: Nothing to report.
Musical: I think I have the basic idea and some initial song ideas.
Jim Nielsen on ordering CSS declarations. Agreed. I’ve been using alphabetical declarations for a while and it’s worked well (and any exceptions are then obvious).
China in Ten Words, by Yu Hua. More personal than I’d expected going in, but I also didn’t know much about the book before starting it so that’s more on me. Fascinating, regardless. Learned a lot about the Cultural Revolution I hadn’t known before.
Recent fiction reads:
The Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins. I’d heard that it was a bit weird, but I had no idea. What a batty book. Disturbing, too. (Consider yourself warned.) Outside of the disturbing parts, though, I liked it — loads of creativity and imagination, which is one of the things that draws me to fantasy.
Books acquired since last issue
Prosper’s Demon — K. J. Parker
Inside Man — K. J. Parker
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia — Orlando Figes
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — H. W. Brands
Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justice — Noah Feldman
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain — Maria Rosa Menocal
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World — Jeff Goodell
Longshot: The Inside Story of the Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine — David Heath
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales — Oliver Sacks
Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary — Timothy Snyder
Brave Companions — David McCullough
The Tiger and the Wolf — Adrian Tchaikovsky
Kill Shot: A Shadow Industry, a Deadly Disease — Jason Dearen
Terrible Swift Sword — Bruce Catton
The Imaginary Corpse — Tyler Hayes
Soulbrand — Andrew Rowe
The Hungry Dreaming — Craig Schaefer
Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS — Richard Yancey
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England: 400–1066 — Marc Morris
The Druid — Jeff Wheeler
Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life — Sutton Foster
Lion’s Blood — Steven Barnes
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence — Bryan Burrough
Darwin’s Armada: Four Voyages and the Battle for the Theory of Evolution — Iain McCalman
A Skinful of Shadows — Frances Hardinge
The Bird King — G. Willow Wilson
New York Times Complete World War II: The Coverage of the Entire Conflict — The New York Times
The Third Reich: A Chronicle — Richard Overy
War: A History in 100 Battles — Richard Overy
The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict — Donald R Hickey
Conqueror’s Blood — Zamil Akhtar
Making
Releases
Pleased to announce the release of the first new story in way too long “Never to Return.” This is the Salviana story I’ve been working on for what feels like forever (though in objective terms I think it’s only been a few months). It’s a fantasy story and is about 15 pages. And it’s done! For real! Finally!
Some new religious art:
I Will Give You Rest III. An attempt to use the new negative space style with the I Will Give You Rest idea. Personally, in hindsight I wish I had kept it monotone, but that’s just me.Annunciation. I’d been wanting to do an Annunciation for a while. I know it’s super minimal, but I like it.A New Star. Another idea I’ve had stewing for years. The concentric circles (borrowing from the mustard seed piece I did recently) are what finally made it work.The Lord’s Passover III. I wanted to do a bolder, starker take on the idea. On this I also experimented with layering multiple rasterized SVGs, each with different random seeds, and ended up with the more painted look around the edges. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I recorded a process video for most of the making of this piece, just need to edit it and post it.I’ve a Mother There II. Lately I’ve mostly been doing the Heavenly Parents together on this type of piece, but I wanted to do one with just Heavenly Mother surrounded by her children.As the Stars. Also a piece I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Part of me wonders if it needs a better center of visual interest.As the Sands. Companion piece. Basically the same thing.Love Your Enemies. I started with this as a generic prayer piece using the negative space style, along with zooming in more than I usually do. Then I was reading the beatitudes in 3 Nephi and it became really clear that I needed to change the title (from The Soul’s Sincere Desire II) and also change the background color from pale blue to a more intense red. Of all the art I’ve made, this piece is one of my favorites. Especially the bold, imperative teaching in the title.
Current projects
There’s some churn here as I’ve been trying to figure out which projects I want to work on. The new projects listed below are generally in areas I’ve wanted to work in for a while; some won’t stick, but I won’t know which ones till I try.
Retzi (working title): I’ve finally figured out a writing process that seems to be working. (Namely, aiming to spend at least ten minutes a day working on writing. It’s not much, but it’s a decent minimum that I can do every day, even on the days when everything is crazy. Also, outlining. I think I’ve got the hang of it now and can now stick with an outline enough to finish the work.) Now that I’ve finished the Salviana story (squeeeee), I’m worldbuilding/outlining this new Retzi story. This time I’m trying (limited) worldbuilding first, because I suspect that may be a better fit for how I come up with story ideas.
Religious art: I’m no longer worried about running out of ideas. For now I’m back to metering releases one at a time instead of releasing three or four at a time, to try to create a steadier stream of work. Should have several more pieces released by next issue.
Picture book: The only picture book I’ve made was more for infants and I’ve long wanted to do something that had an actual story. So this is that project. No idea what it’ll be yet.
Shadow art: An attempt to figure out what kind of art I want to make outside of the religious art I’ve been doing for years (which I plan to continue doing). I love the interplay of light and shadow, and this is a series where I paint just the shadows of different objects. (My Laying on of Hands piece is on the wall in my kitchen and to my eye it looks a little like a spotlight on someone from above, and I’ve wanted to do more pieces that really are that.)
Type design: I’m giving up on Hinterlight and starting a new typeface with simpler curves, which seems like a better idea during this stage where I’m still figuring out proportions and spacing and all that. Better to focus on the bigger picture first, rather than getting fixated on microscale point placement that doesn’t matter as much. I can always distress the curves programmatically later if I want, too. (The idea with Hinterlight was to create a typeface that looked like it had been printed by letterpress.)
Musical: Possibly a short musical, not sure yet. Planning to write the songs along with the book (the play). Something that feels like The Secret Garden intrigues me, but beyond that I have no idea yet what it’ll be about. It’s been a very long time since I wrote a play or a song and I’m excited!
Short film: To be more precise, a very, very short (30-second) animated film. Over the years I’ve picked up a small amount of Blender knowhow but I’ve wanted to actually dive in to rigging and animation to make something real. Also looking forward to scoring this and doing the sound.
A couple weeks ago I updated my to-do list app (Liszt) so that late every night it moves everything from my daily to-do list to my “someday” list. Each morning I review the someday list and move any items back that I plan to do that day. This change has been quite effective at getting me to stop avoiding my to-do list. (Before this, my list would accrete and become so long that I’d basically stop looking at it. Whereas now it’s wonderfully short each day.)
