books

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.

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.

Finally finished rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, reading her translation/rendering notes this afternoon. I don’t understand most of this, but most of what I understand resonates, and a lot of what I don’t makes me think.

Speaking of books, I’m slowly rereading Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching, and I just started rereading her masterwork, Always Coming Home.

Started reading The Will of the Many by James Islington but set aside about a third of the way through. I’d bought a copy based solely on its cover and heft, but found myself disliking every character, none of whom seemed capable of uttering a simple true statement.

Finished reading The Dog of the South by Charles Portis. This was amazing; every character was such a weirdo, such a wild card, that I never knew what was going to happen next, and was just along for the ride. Portis treated each of them with respect, and the overall effect was maybe something like a less cruel, less political Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (meant in a good way).

Finished reading Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett. Probably the best of the now-three books, and I kind of hope it’s the last, because this feels like a good endpoint for Wilde’s story.

Finished reading Dead Lions by Mick Herron, the followup to Slow Horses. This had the same things going for it as the previous, including (which I didn’t mention) something of a sense of humor.

Bonus: This edition of this book only had a handful of typos, one inexplicable but most inconsequential.

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.