Blog: #recent-reads

Nonfiction

• Finished How Asia Works. The third section was on finance and…it turns out I don’t really care about finance. Maybe someday that’ll change, but I’m not there yet. That section was a murky slog through which I forced myself in the misguided hope that perhaps I’d pick up enough contextual clues to, you know, have a clue what it all meant. Overall, though, the book was excellent. The manufacturing section is still my favorite of the bunch.
• I’ve resumed reading Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin biography, which I’d put on the backburner when I started serializing my reading. About a quarter of the way in, and wow, it’s eminently readable. Loving it. By the way, I have a profound weakness for books about inventors and scientists and (less common) printers, so if you have any good recommendations, please send them my way.

Fiction

• Finished Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and liked it very much, even though there’s basically no magic and it’s pretty much fantasy Rome. Glad I still have most of K. J. Parker’s books left to read. (Shadow is the only other of his that I’ve read. And some short stories years ago.)
• I’m a quarter of the way through Andrea Stewart’s The Bone Shard Daughter. It’s hitting a lot of good, intriguing points for me (in the vein of mysterious things happening) and I’m looking forward to the rest.

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• Here we are again, two months later. Aiming to get back into the weekly habit, but this may end up being a more sporadic season.
• I bumped my daily reading goal back up to 100 pages, and I also serialized my reading so I only read one nonfiction and one fiction at a time. Without that, I’ve found that I ignore the harder books and keep returning to the easier ones. Serialization forces me to make progress with books I might otherwise abandon (but that I still want to finish).

Nonfiction

• It’s been a while since I read The Ghost Map, but it was quite good. Not as much about maps as I’d been hoping for, but that wasn’t a problem.
• After that I read Seven at Sea by Erik and Emily Orton, about their family taking up sailing and spending a year or so living on a boat. My wife read it with her book group and, with one of my friends embarking on a similar journey with their family around the same time, it caught my interest. The book was a mixed bag for me, but I’m still glad I read it.
• Next up: Jennifer Steinhauer’s The Firsts, about several of the women who were elected to Congress in 2018 (AOC, Ilhan Omar, etc.). Really liked it.
• And then there was Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day. I had high hopes for this book, expecting to glean some good, actionable productivity advice. I was disappointed. About the only thing I got out of it was this passage: “The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week, or even until tomorrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It won’t. It will be colder.” Which is great. The rest, not so much (for me).
• I read Coretta Scott King’s autobiography, Coretta. Loved it. The first half was much more interesting to me, but I’m still glad I read the second half (post-assassination).
• Thanks to serializing my reading, I finally finished Morris Hicky Morgan’s translation of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture. This book was much more delightfully wide-ranging than I’d expected, with commentary on astronomy and machines and art, among other things. (Vitruvius had it out for non-realistic art, let me tell you. Fantasy was not his thing at all.)
• I’m currently almost halfway through Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, an economic analysis of why some Asian countries have taken off economically and others haven’t. It’s a bit slower going for me since I haven’t read much economics yet, but still quite readable and overall I’m learning a lot and loving it (especially this middle section on manufacturing, though the agriculture section was also fascinating).

Fiction

• The Gameshouse turned out middling for me, which was a mild surprise since I’ve really liked the other books by Claire North that I’ve read (The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and Touch). I loved the Venetian setting, though.
• After that I read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Borders of Infinity, a novella in her Vorkosigan series. Well done as usual.
• I also read Andrew Rowe’s On the Shoulders of Titans, second in his Arcane Ascension series. Definitely popcorn gamelit for me, which I like as an occasional thing but I can’t read too much of it in close succession.
• And then James S. A. Corey’s Babylon’s Ashes, sixth in the Expanse series. It was okay, I think, but I don’t know that I liked it as much as some of the earlier books in the series. Not sure why. I do, however, like seeing how drastically things in that universe have changed since the first book.
• After that I read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Mirror Dance. Glad I still have eight or nine Vorkosigan books left. (I’ve been metering them out so they last longer. Ditto for Discworld. Which reminds me, I’m about due to start Guards! Guards!)
• Also read Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth. I loved it, and in thinking about it afterwards, that’s pretty much entirely because of the voice. Looking forward to reading everything Tamsyn writes. (As is usually the case with these novels, by the way, I would love the book even more if it were free of objectionable content. I don’t know why I feel the need to disclaim that, but there you go.)
• I got partway through Matt Larkin’s Darkness Forged and then bailed since it got a little bit too explicit for me, and the voice wasn’t really doing it for me. I do look forward to reading more Norse-inspired fantasy, though.
• I’m now a fifth of the way through K. J. Parker’s Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and it’s great so far. More engineer protagonists, please.

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• Weeknotes are dead, long live booknotes. In the interest of experimentation and partly because weeknotes were starting to lose their appeal for me, I’m retiring that format. In its place: booknotes. They’ll be effectively the same as the reading section of the weeknotes. The rest of what I used to write about in weeknotes will move back to normal (if sporadic) blog posts.
• I’m also planning to try out seasons, so this is season 1, issue/episode/whatever 1. I have no idea how long the season will be or what would warrant moving to a new season, but I figured it would be fun to try out and see how it goes.
• I’m dropping my reading goal from 100 pages/day to 50, so that I have more time for projects.
• Another thing I want to start doing with these booknotes is, when first mentioning a book, talk about why I’m reading it and what I hope to get out of it. (At this point I plan to do this only for nonfiction. I unofficially sort of started doing it in my last weeknotes.)

Nonfiction

• I finished The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Great book. I really, really enjoyed the parts where he made things like the circuit breaker and the windmill itself, and that’s exactly what I wanted out of it. I hope to find many more books like it, with lots and lots of making things.
• I’m now reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, about cholera in 1850s London. I’d heard about the book several times before, and I’m interested in the story of how they figured out what was causing the epidemic, and in learning more about the London of that time. So far (I’m a fifth of the way in), it’s great. But cholera is not great.
• I need to make more time to read Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin, because I’m really liking it and just hardly ever get to it. As far as intention goes, I’m reading it to learn more about Franklin’s work as a printer, inventor, and scientist, and secondarily to learn more about his political career.
• The Vitruvius is somewhat slow going but fascinating. There’s a bit about good buildings lasting forever, which made me realize I tend to think of buildings as somewhat more ephemeral and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because buildings on campus are always going up or coming down. Or maybe it’s a habit of mind stemming from all the time I spend building ephemeral software. Whatever the case, the idea of fairly permanent alteration of the landscape (not just in preparing for buildings to go up but the building itself) intrigues me.

Fiction

• I finished Killer Dungeon. Fun series. Not a whole lot to say about it.
• This week has not at all been a fiction week for me. I’m around a fifth of the way into Claire North’s The Gameshouse but haven’t really gotten hooked yet. I can’t tell if that’s because of everything else going on (nationally and personally). I think I’ll stick with it for now.

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Recent reads:

Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. My first time reading Vonnegut. Not really what I expected — I don’t know what on earth I was expecting — but I think I liked it. Weird book, though. Looking forward to reading more of him.

Ultralearning, by Scott Young. As I got into this book, I realized I was mainly mining it for ideas to help me get better at writing. And it did deliver, though there’s certainly a lot of the book that wasn’t as useful in that regard.

Educated, by Tara Westover. Whew, that was intense. And maddening. Couldn’t put it down.

The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Not my usual reading fare, but I really, really liked it. Thoughtful and bittersweet and slow, in a good way.

A Craftsman’s Legacy, by Eric Gorges. Made me want to make things with my hands. Which is why I read it.

How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method, by Randy Ingermanson. Framed as a story, which ended up not being my thing, but I do think the snowflake method has a lot of value and I’m currently trying out some variations on it in my own fiction.

Brothers in Arms, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Good as usual. I love the Vorkosigan books. Great comfort reading, kind of like Discworld for me.

The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden. A bit of a slow start for me but then it got good — and darker than I’d expected, which in this case I liked.

Becoming Superman, by J. Michael Straczynski. What an amazing, inspiring story. Plenty of content warnings, though — what a messed-up family.

The Worlds of Medieval Europe, by Clifford R. Backman. Surprisingly readable for a textbook. (Is that bad to say? Any offended textbook authors in the audience?) Learned a ton, particularly about the parts that were blanks in my mental chronology (800s, 900s, etc.).

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, by Caitlin Doughty. Great book — at least if you think about death all the time like I do. I honestly have no idea what normal people would think of it. Right after I read this book, I got an ad from a local mortuary that offers free tours, and you better believe I’m going to go check it out once the semester’s over.

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Recent reads:

Good to Great, by Jim Collins. I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would (having previously had a bit of an aversion to business books). Recommended.

Atomic Habits, by James Clear. Some good ideas here, particularly the push to focus on systems and processes and identity instead of goals.

Quiet, by Susan Cain. Changed how I think about myself and others.

The Light Between Worlds, by Laura E. Weymouth. A lovely, wonderful novel. One of my favorite books ever.

Dark Money, by Jane Mayer. Fascinating book, though the material was disheartening and frustrating.

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. My first time reading this. Definitely darker than I expected (I hadn’t heard about the ending). Not really sure what I think about it.

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Recent reads:

Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport. My favorite parts were the bits on solitude and on analog hobbies and strenuous leisure.

The Revenge of Analog, by David Sax. After reading this, I was ready to shrug off all my digital hobbies and go full analog. Still working on finding the right balance.

Range, by David Epstein. I’m cheating a little by including this since I’m still in the middle of it, but it’s good and right up my alley. The part about premodern villagers being incapable of abstract thought was fascinating.

The World as It Is, by Ben Rhodes. I didn’t vote for Obama, but now I wish I had. A good on-the-ground look at those eight years.

Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson. Whew.

12 Strong, by Doug Stanton. Also whew.

The Tiger, by John Vaillant. The hunt for a man-eating tiger in eastern Russia. Eye-opening.

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Recent reads:

Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall. This was my first foray into geopolitics, and I really liked it. Looking forward to Robert Kaplan’s Revenge of Geography as well.

Tubes, by Andrew Blum. A look into the infrastructure of the Internet. It’s easy to forget about all the wires when we live in a somewhat wireless age, so I appreciated the reminder.

Moon Shot, by Jay Barbree. The story of the early American space program, running through the end of the Apollo missions and a bit beyond. I loved it.

Word by Word, by Kory Stamper. A delightful book about lexicography at Merriam-Webster.

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