Blurt!Sben

books

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.

Wed., Jun. 11, 2025, 11:02:19pm PDT (edited)

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.

Thu., Jun. 5, 2025, 9:57:37am PDT

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.

May 21, 2025, 9:29pm

Last Friday I went to Third Place in Ravenna to see Craig Mod talk about his new book, Things Become Other Things.

May 20, 2025, 6:15pm

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.

May 14, 2025, 6:51am

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.

May 6, 2025, 7:02am

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.

Apr. 17, 2025, 7:25pm

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.

Apr. 4, 2025, 8:20pm

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.

Mar. 24, 2025, 7:10pm

Finished reading Matter by Iain M. Banks, another of his Culture stories. Some mind-blowing ideas, and a really good expansion of scope, and fundamentally a good story — let down a bit at the end by an epilogue whose tone feels a little sour compared to the rest.

Mar. 15, 2025, 10:33pm

Finished reading Mordew by Alex Pheby; I finished the story about a week ago actually, but I’ve been slowly picking my way through the apocrypha at the end of the book. I picked it up solely for its Feiffer-esque front cover and the description on the back. It was Weird, grotesque, such that after I started reading it at bedtime, I had bizarre dreams inspired by book imagery, and thus banished it from the bedroom. Was it good, did I enjoy it? I’m not sure, but it was definitely compelling, and I’ll probably read his next book after some time detoxing from this one.

Feb. 23, 2025, 10:55pm

Finished reading The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden, followup to The Bear and the Nightingale. I enjoyed this one, too, and it had more consistent drive than the first, but Arden relied on a particular plot contrivance trope a little too often for my taste.

Feb. 4, 2025, 7:45am

Finished reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. This book managed the neat trick of being, simultaneously, a sci-fi novel, a thriller, and a romance novel, and pretty good at all three.

Sometimes I entertain myself by explaining today’s world to Samuel Pepys. This book has taken some of that work off my shoulders, for a little while.

Jan. 29, 2025, 11:09pm

Finished reading The Wordhord by Hana Videen. This was a fun amble through some Old English vocabulary, not especially deep or challenging, but fun and interesting.

Jan. 27, 2025, 8:12pm

Finished reading Polostan by Neal Stephenson. Even though I was warned that it was a surprisingly-normal-sized book, I was surprised by its very normal size. That turns out to be a bit deceptive though: The story is very clearly unfinished at the end of the book (though many parts are wrapped up nicely). Two more of these and it’ll feel like a more typical Stephenson opus.

Jan. 11, 2025, 7:30pm