Finished rereading The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O’Brian, book 11 of the Aubrey–Maturin series. We’re in the back half of the series now, and O’Brian clearly wants to introduce new plots and situations, as there’s only so much that can be done with the Royal Navy. Here we have more treachery, a court case, and a thief-taker, leading to a miscarriage of justice and a satisfying climax.
Finished reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This was a slow, dense, enjoyable read; the authors attempt to reinterpret prehistoric and historic societies, and (even with a few rhetorical sleights-of-hand) succeeded. I’ll probably look back on this book as perspective-changing.
Finished reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. I loved this, even though the story mostly ended up being “what did Duchess do this time, and how are the rest of them going to clean up after him?” (Wait, he did what?? But — !)
Finished rereading The Far Side of the World by Patrick O’Brian. A lot happens here, but still he leaves large gaps that earlier books would have filled in, and the ending is one of his most abrupt yet (though it wouldn’t have told us anything we couldn’t figure out on our own).
(It took me a few days to finish Matrix, not just 24 hours — it took me a while to figure out what I thought of The Mask of Mirrors.)
Finished reading Matrix by Lauren Groff. This was lovely: An imagining of the life of Marie of Shaftesbury, creating a feminist haven out of a failing abbey in 12th-century England. I got very strong vibes of both Nicola Griffith’s Hild and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (though this doesn’t quite rise to Le Guin’s level — which is no failing — and Groff wasn’t trying to write either of those books).
Finished reading The Mask of Mirrors by M.A. Carrick. I ended up enjoying this fantasy novel centered around a long con, but several weak points wanted changing: an emotional beat that falls flat, a character with nothing to do, and about one or two hundred extra pages. Maybe a more strict editor would have helped?
Finished reading City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett. This fantasy novel had the misfortune of being read immediately after Middlemarch, and nothing from the first part of this book caught my interest. But I eventually got into the right frame of mind, and enjoyed the book more as I made my way through.
Finished reading Middlemarch by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). This was long, and there wasn’t quite a plot (or at least not a single one), but I’m glad I stuck it out. (“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”)
Finished rereading Treason’s Harbour by Patrick O’Brian (Aubrey–Maturin series, book 9). Still in the sweet spot, with the Kim Philby–esque traitor revealed to the reader in the first couple chapters, but not to Maturin (or Aubrey) in the whole book.
Posted my 2021 reading list.
I squeezed in one more book before the end of the year: Finished reading A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Emma Southon, a fun and chatty look at Roman law and society through the lens of homicide. Southon uses a good chunk of her page count pointing out how little we know about the lives of Romans other than the richest men, and showing us a bit we can infer about the rest.
My Christmas gift to myself was not reading the book on the 24th or 25th.
Finished reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. Reporting on the show trial of the bureaucrat who kept the trains running to Auschwitz, Arendt uses it as a narrow lens to look at the Holocaust. Her discussions of then-modern Germany and Israel are not generally relevant today, but the question that will keep coming back to me is how to resist from within such a system.
Finished rereading The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian (Aubrey–Maturin series, book 8). We’ve kind of settled into the sweet spot of the series, if memory serves, and in any case this book is its own sweet spot, a pretty balance of sailing, spycraft, politics, and interpersonal drama, along with a return to the beloved H.M.S. Surprise.