Finished reading Slow Horses by Mick Herron, first book in the series that’s the basis of the TV series I’ve been meaning to watch. Anyway, it was really good — clever, and deeply cynical in the way an espionage novel can be cynical (maybe not quite as much as Le Carré), which I do enjoy every so often.
A word of warning: This edition of the book was horribly copyedited, with search-and-replace typos, quotation marks instead of apostrophes, and missing and incorrectly-placed paragraph breaks. Mostly just eye-bleedingly obnoxious, but sometimes it actively hindered my understanding of the story.
Finished reading Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo, trans. Charlotte Whittle. This was a fascinating trip back to the birth of writing and, more importantly, of various forms of books, how they were copied, stored, sold, and valued, and a million short digressions, each of which Vallejo tied neatly back into the narrative. As usual, non-fiction meant slow reading, but it was quite good, and also has a lovely and witty index.
This book sung in a neat harmony with Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance, which looked back at the same authors and books from the other end of the timeline.
The phrase “Butlerian Jihad” is being used around the house pretty regularly these days.
Finished reading Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer. This is a history of the Italian Renaissance, and something of a history of a history of it, and shifts at the end to address “progress” and what that means. Casual in tone, but rigorous in structure and argument; quite readable, but long, and I needed to break it up with a couple other books.
Finished reading Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod, which I attended an event for the other night. The book is partly about a walk around Japan’s Kii peninsula, but more a memoir about Mod’s childhood in a similarly economically depressed area. Very well-written and heartfelt.