Overnight tonight for me: my most anticipated sequel of the year, Arkaday Martine's A Desolation Called Peace. The first book won the Hugo Award in 2019, and it was great fun for me as the central imperial power in it - though a space opera - was based on the Mexica/Aztec Empire, with similar family dynamics, naming conventions, and characteristics such as expansionism. The secondary people with an embassy in the capital reminded me of the Tlaxcalans of Mesoamerica (which could have been conquered but weren't, in part so the Aztec had someone to practice military against/with) and there's a looming sort of Cortez-and-company in the wings which is the heart of this book. Or maybe I just read lots of that into the book - not sure. I'm too early in this one to tell.
An interesting little look at the role Dickens had on shaping our modern practices around the holiday. Not as dry as I thought it would be and worth pushing through in just a couple of days.
The Viltrumite War begins and ends. Or does it? Body parts are ripped off, some of them heads. Planets are destroyed, others merely leveled. In the end, we return to Earth and Allen the Alien has a major decision to make as the heir to Thadeus.
Speaking of the Second World War Benedict XVI: A LIFE, Volume One, which I wasn't planning on reading nor really expecting to be that interesting, but the material on the war and the post-war years in Germany was surprisingly captivating, so full props to the author Peter Seewald.
Quick read covering some of the most basic ground about what social media is doing to people. Lanier writes like a programmer, more than a professional writer, but still is logically consistent and engaging.
If this is directed at me, the second volume just came out, and it covers 1966 to the present. So unless he lives to be 125 or so, this will probably be the conclusion. If it's not directed at me, you can use your supermod powers to delete the post.
Was to you - seemed like there was an awful lot left from 66 on and three more volumes would have been easy (up to becoming Pope, most of his reign, deciding to go emeritius and then that period).
I can see that. The biographer is somoene who has published multiple book-length interviews with Ratinger/Benedict, so I wonder if volume II will be a digest of those books turned into more of a narrative. I am most curious about what happened in the late 60s to turn him from progressive to the guy who ran the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith . . . formerly known as The Inquisition.
I thought it might be interesting to reread books I read in college. Since I randomly saw this on the "just returned" cart at my college's library. . . . . . I thought, "why not?" Because Intention was the best book I read in college in the "analytic" tradition. I used some of its arguments for a paper, but my guess is that paper would be incomprehensible to me now. Not the fault of G. E. M. Anscombe, because as I re-read it, I found myself grateful that I did not find A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic or Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (shudder), though I wish I could remember which one of those two helped me make up my mind not to major in philosophy.
First book I finished in 2022 was Leviathan Falls, the last of The Expanse series Now onto Foundation
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. Last I saw, it was at #67 on Amazon's 100 Bestselling Books. It's good to read a novel that has a Byzantine theme. It alternates between the 1453 Fall of Constantinople and the present day. The author won the Pulitzer Prize For Fiction for his previous book. Just started. Looks like a good, challenging tome.
Well, the power of suggestion works. I went to look it up on Amazon, and there's oddly another book published last year that also has the title Cloud Cuckoo Land. Still haven't gotten around to his previous novel, so I may just stack them together sometime this year opposite some shorter nonfiction works.
Hitler's Philosophers the tale of the men who decided to save their asses and sell out to the Nazis with varying degrees of subsequent regret, as well as the men and women who opposed Hitler's rise and, for the most part, got the hell out of Germany, or died trying, by Yvonne Sherratt. I am even more convinced the Carl Schmitt should have been executed as a war criminal.
I watched the movie a few years ago and enjoyed it. I waited for several years for me to forget some of the plot before reading the book. Of course, it was impossible to forget the "plot" twist and ending, Since it was a popular book, people probably has read it.
Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time, a collection of essays (and three lectures) by novelist and one-time New York Times photography critic (and skilled photographer in his own right) Teju Cole, whose novel Open City I happen to be teaching right now. A couple of these essays to a nice job opening up some themes of the book, so I'm going to look way more prepared and skilled than I really am, because I just happened to see this book on the "New Books" shelf when I was returning some DVDs to the public library last week.
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald ""Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point l don't care what it's founded on."
Nolan and Debbie get back together, kind of, and move to Talescria, Mark starts talking to criminals instead of just fighting them, and decides a few are good, Robot/Rex and Monster Girl get back from ruling the Flaxons, and Mark breaks a criminal out after deciding that the end result of destroying Las Vegas was good for humanity. This series is phenomenal, and now I've got just 10 more volumes to go to make it to the end.
Finished Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr The narrative connection between the three time periods - a partially lost-to-time story from ancient Greece - is a good one, and each of the three segments (Constantinople, Idaho/Korea, and the future spaceship) is interesting and well developed. It isn't simplistic but doesn't feel like a 600+ page book - not because it flies by but the way it is organized lends itself to easy start-and-stop points, and Doerr makes sure the whole thing is broadly accessible. I enjoyed it, and the last segments had me stay up past my bedtime by a good 90 minutes as I rushed to the end. There's a great deal of skill evidenced and the characters are compelling. I liked it very much but am not sure I loved it.