One thing I meant to mention about The Every: It struck me how in some ways the book’s namesake shared a philosophy, at least superficially, with the Utopians of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota, but shallow or weaponized.
Finished reading Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. This was a short post-apocalyptic novel, set in a First Nations reservation in northern Ontario, focused entirely on the community: The nature of the apocalypse is entirely irrelevant to the story and thus never discussed, and its effects to the south only barely so. The prose was simple and straightforward, which I think made the story more vivid and, sometimes, harrowing.
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.