I have a pretty tall (conceptual) stack of books to read, but I’m starting to think I need to insert rereads of Le Guin’s Always Coming Home and her version of the Tao Te Ching, up towards the top. It won’t do anything to keep the world from curdling, but maybe I can help my little corner.
Finished reading A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, follow-up to The Tainted Cup. Another fantasy-set murder mystery, this one with a clear anti-autocratic subtext. Bennett makes the subtext explicit in an afterword, laying into the fantasy genre, and A Song of Ice and Fire and its derivatives in particular, for their love of autocracies.
Finished reading Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. This is a sort of introductory survey of all things typography and typesetting. Some of it was material I knew pretty well; a lot of the rest isn’t stuff I know well or have put into practice. (Though as I write this I suddenly am having a flashback to the high school newspaper.) This will definitely stay on my small typography reference shelf.
Finished rereading A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., at least 25 years since I first read it. I liked most of it, a kind of bleakly- or cynically-hopeful story of preservation of knowledge in a cycle of humanity’s self-destruction. Alas, the end of the book centers on a Catholic argument against suicide, which I found a little offputting.
Finished reading The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison, the latest in the series that started with either The Goblin Emperor or The Witness for the Dead depending on how you’re counting. Like the others, this book is generous and compassionate, both towards and among its major characters. It focuses on reparations for sins committed by previous generations, which Addison handles thoughtfully. But two things: First, some offscreen cartoon villainy undercuts some of the care and thought that went into the resolution. Second, the book’s setting and language demand a lot from the reader, and the story picks up immediately after the previous left off; usually I like not reading awkward “remember this from the previous book” insertions, but if any book wants them, it’s this one. Do not pick this up as your first in the series.