Book List: 2018Q2
Here are the books I read in April, May and June. Since it's already August, I'm going to forego commentary on some of these and just hit publish.
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester
This was far more interesting than a book about lexicographical history has any right to be. James Murray ("the Professor") is a fascinating Victorian autodidact. IIRC he dropped out of school at age 16 (the age at which schooling was no longer free in Scotland) by age 19 he was the headmaster of a school. William Chester Minor ("the Madman") is the sort of charming — albeit homicidal — lunatic that I didn't think existed outside of movies. Plus you get to learn about the OED!
The Truth, Terry Pratchett
This is Pratchett's "Discworld" story about the invention of movable type and newspapers. I've yet to read a Discworld book I didn't enjoy, and this is no exception.
The main character, and inventor of newspapers, is named "William de Worde." I thought the surname was a little on the nose even for Pratchett. It turns out that William Caxton's partner and co-introducer of movable type to England was named Wynkyn de Worde, so in reality truth is stranger — or at least as strange as — fiction.
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, Kory Stamper
This was a great read. I loved both the behind the scenes info on what it's like to be a lexicographer working at Mirriam-Webster, the history of dictionaries, and the general discussion of language. The chapters about what their role in society is, as contrasted with what people think it is or want it to be, were especially good.
This is yet another book that I can file away under "the more I learn about language the less of a prescriptivist I become."
The Popes: A History, John Julius Norwich
This was good but not great. I like the overall organization, which is important in such a wide-reaching history. As such, I recommend this if you're interested. I have three complaints though.
(1) The coverage was very uneven. I recognize this was a history of the papacy specifically rather than the Catholic church more broadly, but some capital-B Big events are fairly glossed over, like the English Reformation or the spread of Catholicism to the New World.
(2) Norwich had a habit of mentioning that such and such institution was reformed to do things in a new way without ever explaining what the old way was. It's tough to appreciate why something changing is important if you don't know what the status quo ante was.
(3) When we get to the modern period (say, post 1848), Norwich makes a very common mistake by assuming that theological positions are just like political positions. When the R.C.Ch. is at its best, it is not deciding its "policy" about, e.g. married priests, on the basis of what is popular or expedient or diplomatic or modern. (When it is at its worst and it fails to do this, you get the Reichskonkordat.) Norwich treats the church like a political party choosing a platform. By that standard, it has done a remarkably bad job in the last century and a half.
The R.C.Ch. is not choosing its position on the basis of "what will attract voters parishioners" but instead based on what it believes God thinks is correct. You might think that's silly, or that it makes that determination incorrectly — which as an agnostic non-Catholic, I typically do — but don't make the mistake of thinking it's solving the same problem that a politician is solving when deciding whether to support some new legislative reform. Personally, I think too many of the powerful people in the world — politicians, businesspeople, celebrities — are making decisions based on what is popular, and I'm content with at least some institutions in a poly-centric order not doing that. ((See also: reasons to not want the US Supreme Court to become a democracy of 9 voters.))
Two other less contentious takes:
(a) A shocking number of these stories had a coda along the lines of "but he didn't live to enjoy his triumph; he was dead within k weeks" for very small values of k. Princes and prelates were dropping dead all the time. I wonder what modern politics would be like if people were dying at the same rates.
(b) Rome's weather is the under-rated player in this drama. Seemingly every chapter included either a noble entourage or an entire army fleeing the miserable summer heat. Yes, it's very nice that you brought your overwhelming French and/or German army down to smack some sense into the Curia at swordpoint, but then *boom* malaria. The Holy Roman Emperor was constantly racing down the peninsula in the spring, only to spend about three weeks in the muggy summer sun glaring impotently at Rome's walls, before racing back north to get to the Alps before the passes closed for the winter. If the Popes followed Diocletian just 300 miles up to Mediolanum/Milan a lot of things would have gone very differently.
It wasn't just armies either. I lost count of how many Cardinals and Princes just high-tailed it out of town because of bad weather. ("Yes, yes, I know the fate of Europe hangs in the balance of this election... but the humidity is murder on my hair." ((Actually, I'm doing them a disservice. The humidity was actually, literally killing people. See the point about malaria above. But still, many of them seem to have fled just because the weather was interfering with their lifestyle.)) ). Not that I really blame them. I've been to Rome in August, and I wouldn't stick around either if there weren't some frosty Peronis to help me through it all.
Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory
Super powers plus grifters plus organized crime plus family drama. It was unclear until pretty far into the book how much of the fantastical elements were real and how much they were part of a con job. I liked that dynamic.
Every Anxious Wave, Mo Daviau
The recipe for this is about six parts toxic nostalgia as filtered through rock music, four parts fat acceptance, and one part appreciation of hunter gatherers. It's a weird combination that didn't really hold together for me, but I'm probably not the target audience, so your mileage may vary.
The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings, Lars Brownworth
Pretty much what it says on the tin. Thorough and accessible.
Scourged, Kevin Hearne
This is conclusion to Hearne's "Iron Druid" series. I loved the series as a whole, but this was a little flat. It felt, especially in the first half, like he was trying very hard to tie up lose ends that weren't actually that loose and didn't need to be addressed. The final resolution was good, but it felt like he was trying too hard to avoid "... and everyone walked away happily into the sunset" and so there is some element of a "unhappy ending" that feels a bit forced.
I'm not sure how the writing schedule worked out, but in terms of publishing dates, the first volume (A Plague of Giants) of Hearne's next series ("The Seven Kennings") was released before this was. I can't help but wonder if his interest had already shifted to that work and his heart wasn't really in wrapping up "Iron Druid."
(These paragraphs make me seem much more negative about Scourged than I actually am. It was overall still a fine book.)
Dark Run, Mike Brooks
A good space adventure with a bit of a Firefly vibe. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the next two volumes. This is only one of two sci-fi books I can think of in which software engineering is treated as an indispensable part of spaceflight in general and combat in particular. (The other being Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, with the "programmer-at-arms" role.)
Bone, Volume Seven: Ghost Circles, Jeff Smith
Bone, Volume Eight: Treasure Hunters, Jeff Smith
River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay
This is set in the same universe as Under Heaven, but is almost entirely unrelated. I need a genre descriptor for books like this that are not really fantasy, but do have more than zero unrealistic elements. (In this case, one of the main characters is given a tattoo by a spirit. There is also discussion of ghosts, but these seem to be in the imaginations of the characters rather than "real" in the world of the story.) Regardless, how can I not like a book which revolves so heavily around calligraphy?
The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, Keith Houston
Recommended. The design is excellent, as is befitting for the subject. You can see on the cover that various features are labeled. This device is re-used to good effect throughout. (So rather than having a little image of a page, with an arrows pointing out where the footer, gutter, etc. are, those arrows are just printed right onto the actual text of the book. This turns the book into a self-illustrating example.)
The book is divided into four sections, about paper, printing presses and movable type, printed images, and book binding. For the first section, there was little I didn't already know from Mark Kurlansky's excellent Paper. There were also some bits left out that I have thought were quite important, such as the Hollander beater. The other three sections were quite good though.
A theme running through this books is "someone thought of this invention a long time ago, but couldn't make it practical, then someone else re-invented it years/decades/centuries later (and got the credit)." Honestly, I'm okay with this state of affairs. We lionize that spark of genius inspiration, but the getting-it-to-be-useful phase of technological innovation deserves way more credit.
Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation, Ammon Shea
Allow me to copy-and-paste the following line from my review of Word by Word, above:
This is yet another book that I can file away under "the more I learn about language the less of a prescriptivist I become."
Every chapter of this book is about a thing that pedants have told you not to do, followed by lengthy evidence that their rule is spurious and ahistorical.
One tidbit I did not realize but should have: Latin was "native" to England before English was. If you had asked me when the Romans got to Britain and when the Angles got their, I would have given you the correct centures, and this would have become obvious but it was still a (minor) shock to me. It points out the futility of returning English to some prelapsarian state when it was free of xenolinguistic influences.
Time Travel: A History, James Gleick
Gleick addresses both the science surrounding time travel and the way it has been treated in literature. Well done to him for so seamlessly bridging the STEM/Arts-and-Letters divide. You get Wells, of course, and Einstein, but also Borges and Heraclitus and Proust and Bohr. (And David Foster Wallace, but only to discuss his philosophy thesis paper on fatalism, not any of his fiction.) There is a strong feedback loop between the Two Cultures on this subject, and any treatment of it that didn't address this would have been severely lacking.
Gnomon, Nick Harkaway
I tweeted back over the winter that this was the perfect book to be reading during the first annual Conference on AI, Ethics & Society, which was true. Unfortunately I had to return my library copy shortly thereafter, and only got around to finishing it a couple of months later. This made it difficult to appreciate such a dense book, so probably don't trust my judgment on this one.
Nevertheless, I think this was good, but inferior to Anglemaker and The Gone-Away World (I have not yet read his fourth novel, Tigerman but very much want to). I suspect the problem may be that Harkaway started Gnomon with the themes he wanted to cover and wrote a story to match, rather than writing a story and letting themes emerge. I have no idea though; I don't want to engage in too much armchair-analysis-from-a-distant, especially since I'm basing this off of a short preface and sporadic reading of his Twitter feed. And regardless of whether this analysis is true, these are themes I'm interested in: technology, surveillance, experimental polities & "choosing in groups", altered mental states that aren't drug related, non-monocentric selfhood, cognitive monitoring, etc. So: good, but not his best.
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer
I very much enjoyed this. It's got a wild post-Nation State, poly-centric socio-political system that I loved. It reminded me of how exciting it was reading Diamond Age back in the day.
The downside to this thrillingly exotic setting is that it took several hundred pages before things started to make sense. On top of the setting there's also a self-conscious 18th-Century style combined with 21st Century gender neutral language, and other stylistic choices that made it difficult to get my narrative footing. Even at the end I'm still not sure where the dividing line is between high technology and magic. It was all still very much worth it.
One complaint about the poly-centric, distributed nations: I find it a little implausible that there would be so much concentration, with only seven tribes. Why wouldn't they fracture further? What's holding the Cousins or Gordians together? I would enjoy a long discussion between Palmer and David Friedman on the political economy of this world.