A Slow Circle

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin A really beautiful book. The details are so rich here that the story feels more grounded in Goha's life in a way that the first three books never did. I love the conversation between Goha and Moss about women's magic. Le Guin wrote that she wanted this story to be about the people who inhabited the worlds of traditional fantasy, the ones who things happened to rather than those causing all the action. I think it succeeds and feels very unique as a result. Tales of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin The further I go in these books the more I appreciate them. These short stories are great because you get to see such a variety of characters and their lives, not beholden to any single overarching narrative. Or at least that narrative can only be glimpsed through a dozen broken mirrors. I particularly enjoy the love stories. The Other Wind  by Ursula K. Leguin The last of the Earthsea books. There are more viewpoint characters. Like so many of her other book...

This year I feel I have really broadened out the number and quality of information I regularly take in, mostly through a wider intake of blogs and use of Reddit. The books I've been able to read have been of very high quality too. As always I wish I'd read more but I am pleased what I have read. Presented mostly in the order I read them, I wrote these quick thoughts at the time of reading. Please Stand Back From The Platform Door by Vishal Nanda This is a book of poetry by a friend. It's really good and contains poems about mental health and Hong Kong. The author is reckoning with multilayered and differently-valued identities, foreign-nativeness, how social ladders sort and nudge us into behaviors and what home and self mean when half of life is spent online. Extra-recommended if you get a chance to see Vishal read his own work. The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe Interesting, rather distinct from other fantasy I've read recently. If Piranesi was somehow positiv...

     I recently finished my first reading of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun . It was vivid, profound, difficult, much more literary than I expected - perhaps the best fantasy I've ever read. I won't talk about the plot here. Read it!  I can say that it is strewn with insights that Wolfe casually tosses about like old clothes. One for example, outlines tensions between the individual self, companionship and the collective self: "I have never had much need for companionship, unless it was the companionship of someone I would call a friend. Certainly I have seldom wished the conversation of strangers or the sight of strange faces. I believe rather when I was alone I felt I had in some fashion lost my individuality; to the thrush and the rabbit I had not been Severian, but Man. The many people who like to be utterly alone, and particularly to be utterly alone in a wilderness, do so, I believe, because they enjoy playing that part. But I wanted to be a particular pe...

There is something delicious about a mystery. I won't say much about this but that it continually presents the reader with questions to ponder. The narrative is generous and consistent enough that these questions can yield significant answers. The tone of the book is contemplative and yet also somehow effusive and I can't recommend highly enough the audiobook narrated by Chiwetel Ejiofor.  The rest of this post contains light spoilers, so go and listen to this short novel before reading on.    Piranesi's title character inhabits a house that evokes the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Piranesi's series of Imaginary Prisons (pictured above). Susanna Clarke slowly feeds the reader information that is remarkably clear and consistent, allowing her audience to gradually move from guessing at mysteries to a series of revelations.  At one point in the story Clarke references the wisdom of the ancients. The idea is that certain people operate using a kind of pre-ratio...

I am glad I was able to a good mix of fiction and non-fiction this year. I moved to a hybrid audio and kindle format for most books about partway through the year. Each format has its recommendations. I find kindle better for information uptake generally and often reread passages I listened to beforehand. The addition of a narrator's voice added a great deal to the character of both fiction and non-fiction books. I will continue this method in the future. Dune by Frank Herbert (audio) This is a classic book, reread and enjoyed. It is as though parts of the story are etched in stone, or perhaps in memory. A masterwork of worldbuilding and foreshadowing. Although the age has begun to  show, the main themes of strength through struggle, the power of will, and the interaction between humanity and nature ring clearly throughout. The audio version altered certain scenes and added voice actors, and on the whole the dramatization was delightful. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander (audio...

Review: The WEIRDest People in the World  by Joseph Heinrich This is a huge book, both in ambition and scope. It took me a months to read and and digest as it presents a number of far-reaching concepts such as cross-cultural psychological variation, cultural evolution and a history of European psychology and social institutions. Each of these could encompass a life's work much less a few chapters, and yet we have another topic and another. A veritable banquet. Heinrich's main thesis is that a number of Catholic church policies enacted from 500 to 1000 AD related to marriage and family changed European psychology and institutions in ways that eventually culminated in the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.  Rather than simply walk us through his thesis, Heinrich first explains what legs and feet are and then painstakingly explains the mechanisms of biomechanics so we might put the pieces together and walk through ourselves. Part 1 explains to us first that cross-cul...

I read this book as a part of a book club and I learned from it. Deneen points out many of modern society's failures, in some cases like hitting the broad side of a barn (social inequality, feelings of political powerlessness), in other cases more precisely ('strip mining' of talent from small communities, loss of local institutions and culture, a lack of connection between workers and the product of their labor). Deenen's primary claim is that Liberalism sowed the seeds of modern discord through it's commitment to individual choice at the expense of more communal goals. Deneen's primary claim is that Liberalism as it was conceived and implemented from the 17th C. onwards redefined the Western concept of Liberty and the nature of man. In Western classical and Christian traditions, Liberty was understood to mean disciplined self-rule and freedom from oppression. Liberalism reconceptualized liberty to mean a capacity for individual voluntary choice. This was roote...

During lockdown I started reading again. Initially via audiobook while running, then later also using physical books and ebooks on my commute. Here are my thoughts on some of those books. Fire and Blood by George R. R. Martin (audiobook) This was in many ways a perfect lockdown book. Long, far from reality, emotionally distanced. Very enjoyable in that it presented dozens if hundreds of characters and paid them off one after another with enough detail that things didn't feel forced but not so much detail that everything couldn't be pieced back together into a single long narrative. A great worldbuilder's sourcebook, this felt like the kind of sweeping real world history told from a single learned person's viewpoint. I probably enjoyed this more than I would the main series as it didn't dwell overlong on any one character but packed all of the romance, drama and treachery of the series. Some less charitable would call that emotional removal dry. Warren Buffett and t...