Finished reading The Every by Dave Eggers. It’s a bit of a mess, a novel about a kind of near-future Google/Facebook hybrid, that attacks automation, social media, AI, and (the ideas of) David Brin’s The Transparent Society. With humor that does not consistently land. The first part of the book dragged, too. But by the end it had turned into a pretty good corporate espionage thriller. I would be the prime audience for a better-executed version of this book, but this wasn’t the one.
Finished reading Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney, a survey of our understanding of the Proto Indo-European language and its descendants. I knew bits and pieces of this, but Spinney wove it together into a clear, compelling whole. This was one of my fastest non-fiction reads in quite a while.
Finished reading Civilizations by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor. This was an alternate history where the losing emperor of an Incan civil war conquers much of Europe, introducing religious tolerance and maybe a kind of proto-socialism in the process. I loved the first half of the book; the third quarter kind of lost any sense of stakes, and I started to feel like Binet was writing cleverly rather than well. The end of the book turned me back around, with a sort of epilogue that I haven’t quite fully absorbed. Overall quite good, even if not quite as good as I thought when I started.
Finished reading Real Tigers by Mick Herron, book 3 of the Slough House series, a couple days ago. Another fun read, continuing the humorously cynical tone but this time with a bit more optimism for the slow horses.
Finished reading The Mills of the Gods by Tim Powers. Classic Powers (Phoenician gods + Paris + Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso), executed … well, acceptably. Not one of his great works (start with Last Call or Declare, not his later books), and a little heavy-handed on the Catholicism (were all of his books like this?), but includes a truly harrowing oil lamp–lit journey through the Paris catacombs.