What are you reading these days?

I’ve been watching The Wheel of Time and realized from the discussion online there is a lot I can’t recall at all from the early books so I’ve started to re-read them. I used to actively dislike the idea of re-reading books I've already read but in working through book one I'm realizing my mind isn't the steel trap I thought it was and a lot of it feels decently fresh. At the pace I’m currently setting I’ll be lucky to finish the series a year from now, so perhaps I’ll check back in next December. ;)

Last time this question came up I was reading Arkady Martine's first book. I finished it and then tried to read three other books, all of which were disappointing enough to be put down unfinished. One, the name of which I can't recall, was absolutely terrible all on it's own; the others failed me only by comparison to Martine's outstanding writing (one was the second book in Ada Palmer's series that @skybrian is reading, and I do plan to go back to that).

And so I find myself deep into Arkady Martine's A Desolation Called Peace and it's every bit as good as her previous book. Set in the same universe, with many of the the same characters, only three months after the end of the other book, it still manages to feel like a different story - even though some characters are developing relationships from the prior text. She's such a good writer, her prose is an absolute joy to read. I don't know what I'm going to do when I finish this book because she doesn't have any others out! Without spoilers, this is a book about language and communication, and understanding each other. This is explored though several situations including a war, a child becoming an adult, two lovers and a first contact with an alien race. So far. The writing sparkles, the characters are well rounded and interesting, the settings both vast and terrifying and human-scale and understandable.

I cannot recommend these books enough. I really hope she's writing more, and quickly!

Also I have borrowed the Teixcalaanli naming system to create names for my devices that need names. I set up a server called Six Plasma last weekend.

I finished Perhaps The Stars by Ada Palmer. This is the fourth and last book of the series, and I previously wrote about it here.

The story continues to have surprising plot twists. The unreliable narrator remains unreliable, which keeps you reading closely. It’s at times unclear how many narrators there are. People will disagree on whether justice is served and this is a major concern wrapping things up. But the ending is inspiring enough to be satisfying.

I’m now reading two books. One is Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock which is about climate change and what people do about it as things get worse. It’s very much along the same lines as his previous books, with characters from different parts of the world who have complex ancestries and unusual skills and travel to unlikely places. Also, much of it takes place in Texas where they are dealing with deadly heat, wild hogs, and alligators. This is also the first novel I’ve read that takes place after the pandemic started.

The other is The Genetic Lottery by Katheryn Paige Harden. It’s been widely reviewed and I posted the New Yorker Review already. It is in some ways what I expected. I do like an analogy she uses, which is that the relationship between a gene and how successful someone might be is sort of like the relationship between a word in a recipe and the success of a restaurant. Recipes do matter, since substituting salt for sugar would ruin a recipe. Restaurant that are still around don’t have disastrous recipes, though, and the differences can be subtle. Maybe you could try to figure out using statistics what the word “cilantro” means for how likely a restaurant is to succeed, but this isn’t straightforward and leaves out most of what makes a good restaurant.

I'm currently reading the paperback version of Look to the West by Thomas Anderson. It's part of an alternate history series where the major difference is that rather than declaring independence as a republic, the Thirteen Colonies are reformed as the "Empire of North America" and remain part of the House of Hanover's domains. This change is accomplished by the "point of divergence" where Prince Frederick, son of King George II, is exiled to the colonies after laughing when his father tripped during his coronation ceremony. The exiled prince manages to gain a base of support by trading favors and promises of support with the upper classes of the colonies and even marries Mildred Washington (although this was not entirely intentional since the alternative would've been her father exposing their illicit relationship). This creates a vested interest in keeping the monarchy where it was previously irrelevant to colonial affairs and ties it to the nascent American identity. After winning a succession war with his brother, Frederick comes home to be crowned as King of Great Britain and Emperor of North America, and the differences keep building up from there.

The first book has its differences from real history, and despite being substantial, it tends to be on the drier side of the alternate history genre, rather than the pulpy "what if the South won the Civil War?"-style scenarios written by authors like Harry Turtledove who like to maximize shock value. However, it doesn't hurt to elaborate a bit on what happens in later books. Things get pretty weird starting in the 19th century, which has everything from a naval invasion of Britain by Jacobin France's steam-powered galleys to the annexation of Hawai'i and Japan by a beefed-up Russian Empire. Eventually, the 20th century opens with a radically different geopolitical situation where the big revolutionary threat is in South America of all places, led by a government that wants to achieve world peace by abolishing nationalism and making everyone speak a bastardized version of Latin. Despite the radical shifts from our actual history, the author does a great job of laying out how each individual change happens in a reasonable and consistent manner, all while leaving space for essays on scientific and artistic developments which also manage to mirror our own while being distinctly original.

The book is written in the format of excerpts from various history textbooks and memoirs, so the prose is dense but still readable. There's also a "meta-plot" with narration by researchers who were tasked with traveling to this alternate universe and sending back snippets of information, but it doesn't interfere with the main text much. It's also posted as a series of threads on the alternatehistory.com forums, so you don't even need to buy the books to read it. That was purely a gesture of appreciation on my part, as well as an effort to build up my library a bit.

I'm finishing Cormac McCarthy's The Road tonight. Like everything McCarthy has written, the prose is beautiful and dense. He's got a knack for capturing a space in very few words.

Outside of this, I've been working my way through the following:

• Cole / Pike series, which was initially a little too goofy, but the author found the right rhythm.
• Matthew Scudder from Lawrence Block. A good deal of the series so far is Scudder dealing with his alcoholism. The stories are well written and completely captivating... but for set of a pulpy, noir skiptracer story, they're fairly standard.
• I read The Martian a few weeks back and rewatched the movie last night. I think they did a pretty good job, but the film lacks the sense of isolation, mainly due to the camera work on the surface.
• David Lagercrantz's The Girl in the Spider's Web -- this is a continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy that Lagercrantz completed after Larsson's passing before the third was completed. The first in the second trilogy isn't as polished as the original trilogy, but its still pretty good.

late edit: I forgot that Michael Connelly has another book out. I still don't really like Rachel Ballard, but he's improving.

I read Kitchen Confidential and then Medium Raw once I finished because I didn't feel like I'd gotten quite enough Bourdain. I hadn't watched or read anything by him since his suicide and I finally feel like I can again. I'm not sure why, but his death really bothered me.

I'm also about halfway through The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. This isn't really something I'd normally read, but my wife recommended it. So far it's just heartbreak after heartbreak. I don't get the feeling there will be many good times in this book, but sometimes that's okay.

Overall this year I've read a lot of books for me, somewhere in the mid 30s. Last year I only read 12. I really enjoy my reading time at night and I'm not missing TV shows at all.