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.

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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?)

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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The Clockwork Dynasty, Daniel Wilson

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

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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.)