Finished reading How to Be an Antiracist. It feels like more of a primer than a deep dive, but it’s carefully structured and methodical, and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about it a lot. I hope I put some of what I read into action.
Finished reading The Orphan Tsunami of 1700, finally. I’d put it down for a while, but the subject and presentation are like catnip to me: a popular explanation of the 1700 tsunami with the meticulousness and rigor of an academic paper. (It’s available as a PDF for free if you’d like.)
My Christmas gift to myself was not reading the book on the 24th or 25th.
Finished reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. Reporting on the show trial of the bureaucrat who kept the trains running to Auschwitz, Arendt uses it as a narrow lens to look at the Holocaust. Her discussions of then-modern Germany and Israel are not generally relevant today, but the question that will keep coming back to me is how to resist from within such a system.
Finished rereading The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian (Aubrey–Maturin series, book 8). We’ve kind of settled into the sweet spot of the series, if memory serves, and in any case this book is its own sweet spot, a pretty balance of sailing, spycraft, politics, and interpersonal drama, along with a return to the beloved H.M.S. Surprise.