Tag Archives: history

Book List: 2019Q2

I'll call this the Wizards & Cryptarchs, Frauds & Revolutions Edition —or— "What I've been reading when I'm not prepping for lectures and wrestling with toddlers."

Cover of Ellen Ullman's "Life in Code"

Life in Code, Ellen Ullman

When Ullman sticks to psychology, writing about what's like to be dealing with code, she is brilliant. No one communicates what it feels like to code as well as she does. When she expands the scope to sociology, she is mediocre. I can get that brand of techno-cynical, socialist dirigisme in any magazine on the newsstand. ((Here I'm not using "socialist" as the generic critique of any left-leaning idea that it is sometimes sloppily deployed as. Ullman is a former member of the Communist party; she has self-identified as a socialist.))

This is a collection of previously published essays. The good ones are great, the others are worth reading but not special. They were published over the last several decades, so merely seeing which themes and topics aren't addressed — social media is conspicuously absent from earlier discussion of the internet — is interesting in itself.

Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris and Jeffrey Warren with Carlye Adler

I found this a little too squishy for my tastes, with its "everything can be meditation if you do it right" thesis. I'm saying this as someone who struggles in my meditation practice, so I completely get the strategy here. They want to provide a gentle on-ramp to get non-meditators to give it a shot. I've got nothing against that as a goal or a strategy, but I'd still like a little more discipline from meditation instruction. Meditation isn't supposed to be (too) easy. (What worth doing is?)

Nevertheless, this was pretty good. I've recommended it to my wife, because I think she's a good target audience, much like Dan Harris' own wife. I think she'll appreciate the way different chapters cover various objections to starting a meditation practice (I can't find the time; it's self-indulgent; etc.).

I especially liked the way the authors framed how you should respond when you notice you're "doing it wrong" while sitting: not "shame on me; you're doing a bad job meditating" but "good job for having the self-awareness to notice you're getting distracted."

Cover of "The Dark Forest"

The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu

This is the sequel to Three Body Problem. The first 40% or so of this volume was very slow, but the remainder picked up speed. My chief complaint is that there were no new ideas introduced in the first portion. The translator has changed between the first volume and this one, which may have also contributed to the torpid pacing. (I read TBP some months back, so I can't remember the specifics of what might be different in the translation.)

I'm not sure exactly how to say this, but Dark Forest struck me as being very "Chinese" — the focus on ideological purity and morale in the population, the interest in political affiliations amongst industry and the military, etc. It was interesting to read for that perspective alone.

Dark Forest revolves around what I think of as a Hari Seldon-esque view of social science that I always find off-putting. I'm tempted to say this is another element that is a result of Liu's Chinese heritage, but it crops up so often in SciFi that I can't do that. (I think the actual cause is that many SciFi authors who like physics want history & sociology to be as rigorous and reductionist as physics is.)

A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton

Every chapter of this brief book is about one important philosopher from history. Warburton does a good job of tying them all together into a single thread. It's nothing ground breaking, but makes for a pretty good introduction/refresher. I enjoyed listening to it on dog walks/commutes, because the structure was very digestible: I could listen to one chapter (ten or twelve minutes?), do some learning, and then move on to a different book on a different topic. I don't think I would have been in the mood currently to plow through four hours of Intro Philosophy lessons if I couldn't chunk it up like that.

I first heard of Warburton as the host of the Philosophy Bites podcast, in which he interviews other philosophy professors about their work. I haven't listened in a long time, but I still recommend it. The serious-but-approachable style he uses in that podcast carries through to this book.

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson

I had the same reaction to this that I have to most of the business books I've read: there's a kernel of good information here, but the authors spend twice as long convincing me of how relevant and useful the advice is as they do just giving me the advice. I think they also play a little fast-and-loose with neuroscience for my taste. I didn't notice anything egregiously wrong — and I think they do know what they're talking about — but it felt like they were trying a little too hard to layer on scientific respectability by giving folksy descriptions of brain science.

Nevertheless, there's some pretty good advice here. I think it's difficult to write a book about discipling all kids between the ages of 2 and 18. Maybe my opinion on that will change once mine get out of the toddler stage.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away, Bill Bryson

This is a collection of newspaper columns that Bryson wrote for an English paper after he moved back to America in the 90s. It's about what you would expect from a newspaper humorist. It's never as good as Bryson can really be, but it's pleasing in a homey, comforting way.

It was also nice to have an audiobook I could listen to where each chapter was only several hundred words. I could listen to one of these while knocking out a chore when a more complicated piece of narrative or non-fiction would be difficult to digest in four or five minute chunks.

The comparison of dealing with the Social Security Administration compared to the British immigration authority was the highlight for me.

Grave Peril, Jim Butcher

This is the fourth of Butcher's "Harry Dresden" novels. If you liked the first three, you'll probably like this. You'll probably like it more actually; Butcher seems to be getting better as a writer at this point in his publication history. Honestly I wasn't really paying enough attention to this book to be able to put my finger on why or how.

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi

This is the first in a trilogy about posthuman gentleman-thief Jean le Flambeur. I first read it years back (October 2014), and decided to re-read it before picking up volumes two and three since it was dense with weird concepts and novel vocabulary and allusions. (Cryptarchs! Exomemory! The Engineer-of-Souls! The Dilemma Prison! The All-Defector!) Even the second time through, I found it difficult to keep up with what was happening, since Rajaniemi gives little to no exposition to introduce you to all of the wonderful concepts and terms. Still, this is recommended for its creativity.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Cover to "Wizard of Earthsea"

I first read this when I was probably 10, and again in college, and now again when I'm 35. It not only holds up, I think I like it more.

It's extremely refreshing to read some fantasy that doesn't feel the need to bulk up to 800 pages with descriptions of the dishes at every feast and the heraldry of every noble family.

This is one of the books that I'm really looking forward to reading as a bed time story when the wee ones are old enough for "real" stories. ((By "real" I mean "not finished in a single sitting."))

I can not recommend this enough if you haven't read it before.

Here's some of the Daoist-flavored aphorisms from Wizard of Earthsea that I wrote down this time around:

  • Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine times patience.
  • The wise needn't ask, the fool asks in vain.
  • For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.
  • To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

I've been leaning on that first one really hard with the two previously-mentioned toddlers in the house right now.

Pushing Ice, Alastair Reynolds

This is the second Reynolds books I've read in as many months, and I am a full-on convert now. So much fun.

The preface is set several tens of millennia in the future, and seems to give away what is going to go wrong for our protagonists in the present. The adventure comes from figuring how exactly things go wrong and how they deal with it. Then as you reach about the mid-point of the book or slightly after you realize that that disaster was only the first part of the challenge and things get much weirder than you imagined.

Like House of Suns, Reynolds captures the immensity of space and its psychological impact in a way that few other scifi authors have.

My only complaint is that most of the story takes place in a society of a couple of hundred people, but it seems to have the economic and social structure of a much, much larger population. Would a couple of Dunbars worth of people really be able to support restaurant entrepreneurship, as Reynolds mentions off-hand?

Cover of "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou

Bad Blood, John Carreyrou

I devoured this over the course of a couple of plane rides. It has gotten tons of praise, all of it deserved. I'm not sure what to add.

I have no earthly idea how so many investors and partners would not demand to see a working demo of Theranos' capabilities. I really cannot conceive of agreeing to back a system without being able to compare it to a baseline. "Sounds great. Here's two blood draws from twenty people. You take half of each pair and I'll send the other to a conventional lab. I'm so excited to see how well they match up!" Is that so hard? I don't think I would even take a second meeting — to say nothing of investing nine figures — without seeing the results from that.

Maybe I'm an outlier since so much of what I do day-to-day is about replication? Maybe this is hindsight bias on my part? Maybe I would be just as hoodwinked by Elizabeth Holmes' reported charisma?

A lot of Theranos' success is keeping the scam going was because so many of the insiders who saw through things were bullied into remaining quiet. Many of those who did want to blow the whistle were unable to exfil evidence. Would society be better or worse off if more people had the tradecraft to get the relevant documents out of places like Theranos? I'm guessing this would be a net negative since it would also allow more industrial espionage, more insider trading, etc., but the people who are motivated to do such things also have the motivation to learn how to get away with them, whereas it's the innocent potential whistleblowers who have never thought of a more advanced way to smuggle/maintain data besides "forward it to my personal email account" who are left without tools.

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, David Gilmour

Cover of "The Pursuit of Italy" by David Gilmour

This was a history of Italy-as-a-concept rather than Italy-as-a-geographic-region or Italy-as-a-nation-state. As Massimo d'Azeglio said after the Risorgimento: "We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians." The existence of a single country called "Italy" is highly historically contingent, and The Pursuit of Italy explores that contingency.

I had thought this was primarily going to be about the unification process of the Risorgimento, since I had heard it quoted so heavily in a podcast on that topic. ((Talking History: The Italian Unification.)) Gilmour actually covers much more ground, both before and afterwards. The book continues all the way up to discussions of contemporary politics, including Berlusconi, the Northern League, etc. I think I actually found the period preceding and following unification to be more interesting, as those chapters were more about culture than politics.

One take-away is that almost every Italian political leader since unification seems like a fool, including those with massive public monuments scattered across the country. (Exceptions: Garibaldi seems like a tactical dunce but strategically sharp and extremely charismatic, as well as principled. Mazzini also seems intelligent and principled, but he spent most of his life in exile as persona non grata and has not been fully retconned into the pantheon of Italian founding fathers.) Other than those two, the rest — Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, almost every minister in the 20th Century — look like fools. Even Mussolini seems to have bumbled his way into dictatorship.

Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

This is another book that I've read multiple times before, but probably not since I was twelve or so. I listened to big parts of it while dealing with some severe jet lag, waking up at 3am or so and then drifting back to sleep to the rhythms of narration about herding goats and defending against cannibals.

I was expecting this to be, shall we say... "un-modern" in its philosophy and tone seeing as how it's now exactly three centuries old. And while Friday's eager subservience no doubt puts this on many campus' Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I was actually surprised by the proto-moral-relativism and non-interference that Crusoe adopts toward the natives. There's also a ton of good lessons in here about the nature of wealth, desire, satisfaction, deserts, etc.

Cover of "The Book of Kells" by Bernhard Meehan

The Book of Kells, Bernard Meehan

I didn't read the Book of Kells itself since it's (a) in Latin and (b) so ornate it is nearly unreadable, but Meehan's book about that Book. It has wonderful illustrations throughout, and they are cross-referenced throughout the text in a very clever and unobtrusive way. The Book of Kells is one of the pinnacles of the early Western manuscript tradition, and I love it as much for its numerous imperfections as its elaborate decoration. As a calligrapher I do wish that Meehan talked a bit more about the letterforms as opposed to the illustrations, but I understand that's not something most people would be interested in.

I read this in advance of a trip to Ireland, where I went to see the exhibit of the original manuscript at Trinity College Dublin. I didn't pick this out for any particular reason, Meehan's book just happened to be the one book at my local library on the subject. It also happened to be the one book that the gift shop at Trinity was selling about The Book of Kells, so I suppose that means it's pretty authoritative?

by jsylvest Posted on 12 July 2019
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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.

Cover of "The Professor and the Madman," Simon Winchester
"The Professor and the Madman," Simon Winchester

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."

Cover of "The Popes," J.J. Norwich
"The Popes," J.J. Norwich

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?

Cover of "The Book" by Keith Houston
"The Book," Keith Houston

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.

Cover of "Gnomon" by Nick Harkaway
"Gnomon," Nick Harkaway

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.

by jsylvest Posted on 7 August 2018
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Book List: 2018Q1

Yes, I realize it is now most of the way through the 2nd quarter of the year. Whatever. Here are the books I read in the first three months.

Cover of "Sourdough" by Robin Sloan
"Sourdough," Robin Sloan

Sourdough, Robin Sloan

I love technology, and I love baking bread. I'm pretty much right in the cross hairs for target audience of this one, and I loved it. The protagonist is a programmer who takes up baking. It's so refreshing to read an author that has actual experience with technology. My only complaint is that the protagonist takes to baking bread so easily and flawlessly (even building her own backyard oven overnight) that it made me feel inadequate. Then I remembered that this is fictional, so I stopped moping and decided it was time to get back on the sourdough train and build up a starter again.

Actually I do have one other complaint: how can the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore publish a book without a colophon in it? The Walbaum face used to set this great choice here, and it deserves to be recognized as such.

Persepolis Rising, James S. A. Corey

This is another solid entry in the Expanse series. I actually felt bad when bad things happened to the antagonist, so well done to the author/s for making a sympathetic villain. (Although even calling him "villain" kind of misses the point.)

Cover of "The Storm Before the Storm" by Mike Duncan
"The Storm Before the Storm," Mike Duncan

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, Mike Duncan

This is Duncan's first book. He's the creator of the podcast series "The History of Rome" and "Revolutions." The former was instrumental in getting me interested in podcasts ((along with EconTalk and the old archives of Car Talk)), and the latter is one of the best podcasts going.

He did a great job with this book, and it's a severely under-reported period of history. Roman history is always Caesar, Caesar, Caesar and I understand why the final transition from Republic to Empire gets all the top billing. But that's just the final stage. This rewinds the clock about a century to talk about what set all of that in motion. It's a valuable story by itself, but it's also a great thing to read in 2018: every time I read the news I feel a little bit more mos maiorum getting chipped away.

Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, John Hodgman

Nostalgic essays from someone who thinks nostalgia is a very toxic impulse. Good balance of humor and pathos. If you're a Judge John Hodgman listener you probably know what to expect here, because he's mentioned some of these stories and it takes on a similar tone of the more heartfelt portion of his judgements. I think he overdid it a little with the self-guilt about being financially successful, but that wasn't a major problem.

Cover of "Lesser Beasts" by Mark Essig
"Lesser Beasts," Mark Essig

Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig, Mark Essig

Fascinating. I would have liked a little more on the role of pigs outside of Europe/Middle East/North America, but Essig says right up front that he's limited the geographic scope so I can't fault him too much. (There is a small amount of material of about East Asia.)

He presented some interesting historic background on religious taboos against pork. (It was trivial for Egyptian religious authorities to proscribe pork since it was strictly a food for the underclass anyway. He presents a thesis that it was similarly easy for Jews to outlaw pork because it was a very small part of the Levantine diet to begin with. I'm not nearly knowledgeable to know how this compares to the story I had heard before, whereby the prohibition was a round about way of avoiding trichinosis, etc. but it seems like an overlooked factor. Essig also considers the interaction between the pork-avoiding Jews and pork-loving Romans as an in-group/out-group marker. If the Romans had been ambivalent about pork would it loom as large in modern understanding of kosher food? I don't know, I'm way out of my element here.)

I would love to know more about why pork can be preserved so much more effectively than beef, etc. What is it about pork that makes it so amenable to drying, salting, etc.?

There was good discussion toward the tend about conditions in contemporary hog farms that was... uncomfortable. Similar to my review of Banana, I give credit to Essig for recognizing that changing conditions will only come about if consumers chose to accept higher prices rather than via political action.

The End of All Things, John Scalzi

I usually have a hard time giving up on series after I've started them, but I've had enough of the "Old Man's War" books at this point. This volume was so heavy-handed with theming. In addition, the structure was weak. Rather than a complete novel, it's one novella and a handful of connected stories. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but combined with the way the moral of the story was slathered on so thickly it made the entire book feel sloppy and lazy.

This, along with some other series I've read recently ((along with the way Disney has expanded the Star Wars series)), has lead me to conclude that a high-ROI strategy for a mercenary writer is to put together four solid, popular novels and then just keep cranking out short stories set in the same universe ad infinitum. I suspect there are enough completists like me that will keep gobbling up even sub-mediocre output if it has characters and settings we know. (But I've never written any fiction, so what do I know?)

Cover of "Heart of Europe" by Peter Wilson
"Heart of Europe," Peter Wilson

Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, Peter Wilson

This is a beast of a book. Long, comprehensive and detailed. It's main theme is "everything you know is wrong, or at least much more subtle and complicated" but since I knew very little about the HRE to begin with it took me quite a while to get a grip on this book.

The entire book is thematically rather than chronologically oriented. As much as I liked this, I think I would have liked it much more if I had a better mental model of the basic events.

This is a particularly good book to be reading in 2018. Many of our biggest political questions around the world seem to be rooted in wrestling with issues of sovereignty, so there's a lot to be learned from the mixed-sovereignty thing the HRE had going on.

Cover of "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman.
"Norse Mythology," Neil Gaiman

Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman

This is pretty self-recommending, and it lives up to that.

I held off reading this until I could get a physical rather than digital copy because it was such a handsome book. The one exception was some incorrectly set apostrophes in the otherwise beautiful Cochin typeface. (I posted some examples to Twitter, and Gaiman brought it to WW Norton's attention, who say they'll be fixing it in the future.)

I liked Gaiman's description of the magical chains used to bind Fenris:

Odin brooded and he pondered and he thought. All the wisdom of Mimir's well was his, and the wisdom he had gained from hanging from the world-tree, a sacrifice to himself. At last he called the light elf Skirnir, Frey's messenger, to his side, and he described the chain called Gleipnir. Skirnir rode his horse across the rainbow bridge to Svartalfheim, with instructions to the dwarfs for how to create a chain unlike anything ever made before.

The dwarfs listened to Skirnir describe the commission, and they shivered, and they named their price. Skirnir agreed, as he had been instructed to do by Odin, although the dwarfs' price was high. The dwarfs gathered the ingredients they would need to make Gleipnir.

These were the six things the dwarfs gathered:

For firstly, the footsteps of a cat.
For secondly, the beard of a woman.
For thirdly, the roots of a mountain.
For fourthly, the sinews of a bear.
For fifthly, the breath of a fish.
For sixth and lastly, the spittle of a bird.

Each of these things was used to make Gleipnir. (You say you have not seen these things? Of course you have not. The dwarfs used them in their crafting.)

I don't know if that's a standard explanation for how non-existent things were used, but I think it's a charming touch.

A Plague of Giants, Kevin Hearne

This is the first in Hearne's new series called "The Seven Kennings." It was good, but Hearne sort of throws the reader in the deep end at the beginning and it was tough figuring out what this world was and how it worked. Luckily it was a long book, so there was plenty of runway to get things sorted out. Unluckily, it was a loooong book. And the whole thing was just the first act of a much longer story, with no resolution of its own. Why do fantasy authors do this? Why do we readers like them to? Look, I enjoyed this, and will be happily reading the next volume, but come on. Hearne's prior "Iron Druid" series was composed of modest length books each one of which contained a three-act adventure, and all of them fit into a larger sequence. He can clearly deliver good story without needing thousands of pages.

(Yes, I am being grumpy about this. No, that is not fair to Hearne; he can write whatever books he damn well pleases. I would just like to be able to get some fantasy books that don't take two dozen hours to listen to even when I'm cruising through them at 2x speed.)

The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, David Damrosch

I liked the way this was structured, working backwards from the translation of the Epic, to its discovery, through the development Assyriology more generally, back to the time is was originally written and then further back in history when the the story itself is taking place.

Some of the people involved in this chain were fascinating. Besides Gilgamesh itself, it was an interesting look into the operation of the Victorian academy. I can imagine a lot of contemporary "Blue Tribe" folks being really interested in the descriptions regarding privilege (or lack of, especially w.r.t. the ethnicity of Hormuzd Rassam but also the working class background of George Smith). I can see a lot of Red Tribe folks focusing on the up-by-their-bootstraps self-improvement that those guys pulled off via non-state-sponsored education. Both of them would be right. The interplay between those two themes is a whole discussion I don't want to get into now. What I'm going to do instead is copy out the first few lines from a poem called "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Nether World" that appears as an epilogue on the tablets that contain the Epic of Gilgamesh itself. It begins:

In those days, in those distant days
In those nights, in those remote nights
In those years, in those far away years

I find these lines viscerally appealing in a way I can't explain, and I think I might make them my next calligraphy project. What I'd really like to do is find out what the original cuneiform looks like and superimpose the translation on that, but I haven't been able to track it down with confidence. I've done one linocut with cuneiform before, and it would be fun to combine printing and calligraphy somehow.

The Clockwork Dynasty, Daniel Wilson

A semi-steampunk sort of mystery/adventure. Not terrible, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Dark State, Charles Stross

I'm tempted to copy-and-paste what I said about the Scalzi book above. This "Merchant Princes" series has run it's course. It was a fascinating premise to begin with, but it's degenerated into a venue for the author to complain about contemporary politics with a thin veneer of action. (And I actually agree with many of the complaints Scalzi is making, but... it's boring.)

by jsylvest Posted on 7 June 2018
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