Blog: #recent-reads

I haven’t done a great job at consistency in titling these reading posts, which isn’t the end of the world but I do want them to be titled henceforth, so we’re going to leave the unnumbered masses behind us and resurrect the Booknotes series, starting season 2. I’ll be using the #recent-reads tag as the throughline for all of these types of posts, though.

Nonfiction

• Chatter, by Ethan Kross. This was a useful read. I’ve been using the distanced self-talk idea since reading the book and it does seem like it works, for what it’s worth. Apparently we talk to ourselves at rates as high as 4,000 wpm. (If I could harness that and redirect its output to my laptop or phone, I could write a novel in…half an hour. Ha. Back in reality, answering what I imagine would be the next question: no, I have no interest in using AI to write fiction. Or in reading fiction written by AI for that matter.) the author says we spend a third to a half of our waking life mentally not in the present, which seemed startling at first but upon reflection made sense. Frequent time travelers, us lot.
• Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum, about the 1930s Holodomor in Ukraine. The last third is where it gets especially bleak and so, so tragic. Now I understand why doing genealogy in certain parts of Ukraine is basically impossible. The book is horrifying, too — especially the parts about adults cannibalizing their own children. It’s an important book and I’m glad I read it because I didn’t know anything about the famine beforehand, but goodness, make sure you read something happy after this.

Fiction

• The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks. Interesting ideas (the post-scarcity culture, the games, the central conceit), good writing. One gross part. That twist at the very end, though!
• A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, by Becky Chambers. Cozy and philosophical. Some parts I could have done without (true of almost all contemporary novels I read), but overall I liked it.

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Recent nonfiction reads

• The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, by Toby Wilkinson. While it admittedly took me four months to read this (slow going because of all the less familiar names), I liked it a lot. How vast a time period this is — and yet still so inconsequentially small from a geological/cosmological perspective. I didn’t realize it took three years (speaking of mere blips) from the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb to when they finally opened his sarcophagus. Also didn’t know that pharaoh originally meant “palace,” or how often pharaohs repurposed the materials from previous pharaohs’ tombs. (All the time.) I took Middle Egyptian and Coptic in college and reading this book reminded me of that and really made me miss studying dead languages. I need to make time for that again, somehow.
• Saints volume 3. Loved it. These were mostly parts of Church history I was less familiar with, so I enjoyed filling in those gaps. It was also fascinating to see how various world events affected people in the Church in different countries. Looking forward to the next volume. In the meantime, I’ve been dipping into the global histories.

Recent fiction reads

• The Justice of Kings, by Richard Swan. I really liked this. The legal/judicial aspect was right up my alley and the fantastical/horror elements also worked well for me. The writing’s great, too. Immediately bought the sequel, which came out a few weeks ago.
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Didn’t like it anywhere near as much as Remains of the Day or Buried Giant. It felt a lot more like Klara and the Sun, which I also didn’t like all that much. (This type of story doesn’t appeal to me. I need to stop forgetting this.) Also, I went in having heard there was a twist and…there wasn’t one. Not really.

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Recent nonfiction reads

• The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder. Really good! I especially enjoyed the technical details about building computers in the early 1980s. I’m grateful that debugging is so much easier now (with the caveat that I’m sure it’s probably harder for the engineers building today’s computers than it is for those of us building higher up the stack). While part of me wishes I could have been there to build a new computer, the overtime culture at Data General seemed unhealthy and management seemed immature, and that’s not worth it regardless of how innovative or interesting the work is.
• In Praise of Slowness, by Carl Honoré. I felt like this could probably have been shorter (self-help isn’t really my thing, by the way), but still worth reading. I now drive the speed limit, which I didn’t expect to be an outcome of reading this book. I also find myself consciously acknowledging that things usually don’t need to be rushed, which has been helpful. The bit about playing classical music half as fast was fascinating, too.

Recent fiction reads

• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. For some reason I thought this was going to be boring and stodgy (I knew basically nothing about it before reading it), but it was well crafted, eminently readable, with good prose. It felt modern, too — almost like it could have been written yesterday. But it was also uncomfortable and heavy and so, so sad. This reminded me once again that as a rule I don’t particularly like dystopian fiction. Also, I learned that mayday is a borrowing from the French m’aidez — “help me.”
• Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I…didn’t really like it. Or get much out of it. (Even though I tried to.) For me it was kind of a rambly mess, and the humor didn’t do anything for me either. But I’m glad other people like the book. I did sort of like Cat’s Cradle, so Vonnegut’s not completely off the table for me, but I’m also in no rush to read the rest of his catalog.

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Recent nonfiction reads

• The Rules We Break, by Eric Zimmerman. A fun exploration into game design that got me itching to design some games. The last third was less interesting to me because of what I wanted out of the book (it felt more geared toward professional game designers in some ways). I did, however, appreciate the parts on the problems with gamification and the ethics of game design.
• The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester. A history of precision. So, so fascinating, throughout pretty much the whole book. Loved it. It covers the making of cars, photography, jet engines, GPS, the Hubble, and more. Highly recommended.

Recent fiction reads

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. Well written and immersive. I almost quit about halfway through when a flashback reminded me of some recent tragedy, but I’m glad I returned and finished it. Really liked the game development parts. Looking forward to reading The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry.
• The Lord of Stariel, by A. J. Lancaster. I liked it (the twist mid-book was nice) but I’m not planning to continue the series. The author’s content warning page is a great idea, though — I wish more authors did that.
• Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I don’t know how time slipped by like this, but it had been two years somehow since I last read a Vorkosigan book. (I’ve been trying to read at least one a year, spacing them out so that I don’t run out too quickly. I’m in the middle of the series now.) I liked this one a lot. Looking forward to seeing phase 2 of Miles’s career.

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Minor prefatory note: I’ve updated the reading page with a slight redesign and (for 2022 reads) the year of publication.

Recent nonfiction reads

• I Wish I’d Been There, edited by Byron Hollinshead. Historians talking about the parts of American history they wish they could go back in time to see. Really enjoyed this, and now I’ve got a whole bunch more parts of history I want to read up on.
• Extra Life, by Steven Johnson. Such a fascinating book. Strongly recommended. (Also, those milk deaths in Manhattan — yikes.) I especially loved the corrective focus on larger networks and activism, which this quote from the book summarizes nicely:

In an age that so often conflates innovation with entrepreneurial risk taking and the creative power of the free market, the history of life expectancy offers an important corrective: the most fundamental and inarguable form of progress we have experienced over the past few centuries has not come from big corporations or start-ups. It has come, instead, from activists struggling for reform; from university-based scientists sharing their findings open-source style; and from nonprofit agencies spreading new scientific breakthroughs in low-income countries around the world.

Recent fiction reads

• Petty Treasons, by Victoria Goddard. A novella, and a prequel to The Hands of the Emperor. The second-person POV was a little bit harder to read for some reason (which wasn’t the case with Ogres below). Nice to return to the world, though, and to see some of the retold events from a different perspective.
• The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler. This had a bit of an Arrival vibe. Overall, I liked it, but it wasn’t as perfect a fit for me as I’d hoped it might be. Still interesting, though.
• Inside Man, by K. J. Parker. A novella. Enjoyed it. The central conceit of this subseries of novellas is fun. (Well, it would be utterly horrifying in real life, but as a fictional exploration it’s fun.)
• The Expert System’s Champion, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A novella, takes place ten years after The Expert System’s Brother. The second half was much more interesting for me than the first half (which I struggled with, not sure why).
• The Law, by Jim Butcher. A novella, takes place after Battle Ground. Fun to return to that world (though acknowledging that as usual with the Dresden Files, there are male-gazy parts I could very much do without).
• Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Another novella. Yes, yes, it was to pad my numbers. I do really like novellas, though, and I wish more books were shorter. This was my favorite Tchaikovsky read so far. That final twist!

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Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker is finally available as an ebook! (On the Kindle store, anyway. I haven’t checked other places.)

Recent nonfiction reads

• Terry Pratchett, by Rob Wilkins. Quite liked this one. The end is sad, but that’s usually the case with full-life biographies. Probably about time to read another Discworld novel.
• Chokepoint Capitalism, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. Maddening. I really, really do not like big, hungry capitalism, and I hope we as a society can push things back to a healthier level. Job guarantees sound amazing.
• Human Errors, by Nathan H. Lents. So fascinating! I jabbered about this book to my wife and coworkers ad nauseam — the RLN, throat structure, wrist bones, DNA copy rates, sickle-cell disease, retinal wiring, I’ll stop now. For me the takeaway that I think I’ll remember most was that animals in the wild are constantly on the edge of starvation and so we’re evolutionarily wired to eat as if it’s our last meal before winter, which also leads to it being really easy to gain weight but really hard to lose it.

Recent fiction reads

• I tried to read China Miéville’s The City & the City, but the central conceit — two cities interleaved in the same space where each city’s residents straight up ignore the other city — just wasn’t doing it for me. Probably because I went into it expecting there to be a magical/supernatural reason people couldn’t see the other city (a ghost city of sorts that occasionally leaks through).
• The Expert System’s Brother, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A novella. Enjoyed it, and looking forward to the sequel. And to the rest of Tchaikovsky’s books (including City of Last Chances, which came out today, I believe).
• The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle. A novella. Quite liked it. A bit graphic at the end, which reminded me that this was horror and not just dark fantasy, and that horror isn’t my thing most of the time.
• A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow. A novella. Really liked the variations and folktaleishness.

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Grief hit a little bit harder the past few weeks and made reading more difficult.

Recent nonfiction reads

• The Anna Karenina Fix, by Viv Groskop. A short, enjoyable survey of Russian lit. The part that stuck with me most: “[Ann Patchett] describes reading Anna Karenina at the age of twenty-one and believing that Anna and Vronsky were the most charming, romantic people in the world and that Kitty and Levin the most boring, pathetic people in the world. She writes, ‘Last year I turned 49, and I read the book again. This time, I loved Levin and Kitty… Anna and Vronsky bored me.’ As we get older, she concludes, ‘we gravitate towards the quieter, kinder plotlines, and find them to be richer than we had originally understood them to be’.” I feel like I’m getting to that point, where I’m more interested in quieter, kinder plotlines.
• Out of the Software Crisis, by Baldur Bjarnason. A bit more prescriptive than I was in the mood for. I also haven’t run into a lot of the programming culture he describes. That said, I did find a couple of the ideas interesting: first, programming as a branch of design rather than engineering — more like filmmaking than bridge building. I’m still thinking on this and haven’t yet decided whether I agree. Second, programming as pop culture, with a neverending stream of faddish new technologies. This one resonates with me. It’s exhausting. The older I get, the better “use boring technology” sounds.

Recent fiction reads

• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Some parts have not aged well at all, and there are definitely some cringey bits, but ignoring all that, overall I liked it. (This in spite of cyberpunk not being an aesthetic I really care for.) Interesting ideas, and the linguistic angle appealed to me.
• The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik, third book in the Scholomance trilogy. Not as good for me as the first two — in fact, I almost gave up a third of the way in, and then again two-thirds in. I struggled with the voice, which surprisingly started grating on me for some reason. But I still liked some of the reveals later in the book.

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Recent nonfiction reads

• Karachi Vice, by Samira Shackle, about contemporary Pakistan. Really good, liked it a lot. It’s frustrating that villages there still don’t have good access to water, and that the rich continue to tread upon the poor.
• How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith, about slavery. Really, really good. Strongly recommended. I haven’t read many books about slavery (yet), but this one very much opened my eyes — not only to what happened in the past but also to what’s still happening even now (like in Angola, the prison in Louisiana). Heartbreaking. This was also the book that woke me up to the fact that several of my ancestors from Virginia and North Carolina were slave owners. I’d been aware of that before (one of them is buried at Blandford Cemetery, which one of the book’s chapters is about), but back then it didn’t hold any emotional meaning for me. Now it does. I’m still coming to terms with it — with knowing some of my ancestors were complicit in an enormous crime against humanity. This’ll take some time to process.

Recent fiction reads

• Babel, by R. F. Kuang. Liked it a lot! More dark academia, please. The way the book addressed British colonization, too, was direct and pervasive and I really liked it. Also enjoyed the magic system and the linguistics.
• The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu. This paired well with Babel. Lots of tragic Asian history interwoven throughout. Some stories were better than others, as is always the case. There was one story that had a father committing suicide that was a little bit harder to read. (That said, fictional depictions of parents dying don’t seem to affect me nearly as much as film depictions.)
• Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir. What a bonkers book. I didn’t know what was happening most of the time, but I also didn’t particularly mind because I liked the voice so much. (After finishing the book, I found an explanation on Reddit that made everything make a lot more sense. In hindsight, it would have helped if I’d read summaries of Gideon and Harrow before starting on Nona.) Looking forward to Alecto.

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As anticipated in issue 2.4, Kobo announced the Clara 2E, with a Carta 1200 screen. I haven’t been reading as much on my Kobo lately, though, so I don’t know if I’ll get one.

Recent nonfiction reads

• In the Land of Invented Languages, by Akira Okrent. Enjoyed this. Conlangs don’t actually interest me all that much — there are so many natural languages to learn instead — but they’re still fun to read about. The bit about thesaurus organization was fascinating. Quite interesting throughout.
• The Infiltrator, by Robert Mazur. Whew. This was perhaps a bit more intense than I wanted, though thankfully not really violent at all. So, so glad that I did not a choose a career path that led to going undercover for anything.

Recent fiction reads

• Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett. While there were some earthy bits I could have done without, in general I liked this. The magic system reminded me of writing software, which I liked, and things definitely got interesting at the end.
• The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole. A bit silly, and sadly not scary at all. (Which apparently is what I wanted from it.)
• Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen. Delightfully funny at first — loved the satire — but then there wasn’t nearly as much humor in the second half. Or if there was, I missed it. I did, however, come across the word rhodomontade for the first time.

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A good month for reading — pretty sure I’ll hit 5,000 pages by the end, at the rate I’m going. (Not that quantity matters more than quality, to be clear.)

Recent nonfiction reads

• Clementine, by Sofia Purnell. A biography of Clementine Churchill, Winston’s wife. This was a somewhat draining book — sad family life perpetuated across three generations (so much bad parenting and dysfunctional marriage and adultery!), not to mention the weight of two world wars — but I’m glad I read it. Before this, for example, I don’t think I’d read much WWII history from the British perspective. Eye-opening. Also, I came across “rumbustious” for the first time ever. What a lovely word.
• Here Is Real Magic, by Nate Staniforth. Quite liked this. I didn’t expect half the book to be a bit of an India travelogue, but it turned out to be a nice surprise. (India and Brazil have been in my mind a lot lately as places I’d like to travel to someday.)

Recent fiction reads

• The Hands of the Emperor, by Victoria Goddard. I initially heard about this via Alexandra Rowland’s post and figured I’d give it a try. Ended up loving it, enough so that I immediately bought all of Goddard’s other books. It’s cozy fantasy — more calm, less action — and I initially thought it was going to be too relaxed for me, but the stellar character work sucked me in before long. There’s also enough magic to make it interesting to me (I struggle with completely mundane fiction), though the magic is not at all the point of the book. Reading about Cliopher kept reminding me (in some ways) of my time as ward executive secretary and ward clerk over the years. Fond memories. Looking forward to reading the rest of the books (of which there are many, and they’re multiplying quickly!).
• A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, by K. J. Parker. Final installment in the Siege trilogy. This one didn’t click as much for me as the others did, sadly. Not entirely sure why, but I suspect I had trouble suspending disbelief with the central conceit. (Which confuses me a little, because it’s basically the same conceit as in the first two books.) The archery nerdery was fun, though.

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