Arlie Keeps on Reading in 2025 Thread 2

I'm Arlie, a 67 year old retired software engineer, living in Silicon Valley, California. broadly construed. This will be my fifth year of the 75 books challenge. I was born in Canada, but moved to the US in 1992, and to California in 1997.

My household consists of two retired adults and one aging dog. We also feed an ever changing menagerie of stray and feral cats.

Now that I have as much time as I want to read, and less tendency to come home stressed and exhausted, I find that my reading tastes are changing. Perhaps there's also some influence from other 75-ers ;-) I don't know where this will end up, but I'm enjoying the journey.

My fiction reading is mostly SF/Fantasy, with a bit of historical fiction and the occasional mystery. My focus is on escapism, and I avoid anything labelled literature unless it's very old indeed.

My non-fiction reading tends to be all about learning new things. I've spent the past few years with about half my non-fiction reading focussed on particular subject areas I wanted to learn more about, reading about them until I'm mostly satisfied, or at least run out of new information. (In some cases, I intend to keep reading about the topic as new books come out, or come back in a few years to learn how the field has been changed by ongoing research.) The rest has been a mix of perennially favorite topics, favorite authors, and random books that happened to catch my attention.

Recent focus topics: biology (so much has changed since I was in college), economics, politics, Ottoman history. Perennial favorites: science, history, technology.

The rest of my life includes playing bridge, cooking more than I ever had time for, playing computer games, reducing the amount of stuff in our home while reorganizing what remains, and helping my body recover from too many decades of spending most of my time at a desk. I'm also currently assisting my housemate, M, who is recovering from an emergency hip replacement after a fall two days before (US) Thanksgiving 2024.

I mostly read in English, but have been known to read simple material in French or even German. That's almost always light fiction, given my less than stellar linguistic skills.

My Rating System

5. Excellent. Read this now!
4.5. Very Good. If fiction, well worth rereading; if non-fiction, I learned a lot.
4. Very good, but not quite 4.5. If fiction, likely reread; if non-fiction, I learned a lot.
3. Decent read, but not special in any way.
2.5 Why did I bother finishing this?
2. Did not finish.
1. Ran screaming, and you should too.

Links

My 2021 thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/328797
My 2022 thread, part 1: https://www.librarything.com/topic/337717
My 2023 thread, part 1: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346763
My 2024 thread, part 1: https://www.librarything.com/topic/356637
My 2025 thread, part 1: https://www.librarything.com/topic/367049

Books Completed Jan 2025

1. After 1177 B. C. : the survival of civilizations by Eric H. Cline
2. 278302016::Basic economics : a common sense guide to the economy, 5th edition by Thomas Sowell
3. Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, Fourth Edition by James D. Gwartney, Dwight R. Lee, Tawni Hunt Ferrarini, Joseph P. Callhoun and Jane Shaw Stroup
4. The Witch Goddess by Robert Adams (reread)
5. The genius of China : 3,000 years of science, discovery, & invention by Robert K. G. Temple
6. The economic government of the world : 1933-2023 by Martin J. Daunton
7. Unlikely heroes : Franklin Roosevelt, his four lieutenants, and the world they made by Derek Leebaert
8. Puerto Rico : a national history by Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo

Books Completed Feb 2025

9. The Corinthian by Georgette Heyer
10. The toll-gate by Georgette Heyer
11. Native nations : a millennium of indigenous change and persistence by Kathleen DuVal
12. The mapping of love and death by Jacqueline Winspear
13. A lesson in secrets by Jacqueline Winspear
14. These old shades by Georgette Heyer
15. The politics of our time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism by John B. Judis
16. Frederica by Georgette Heyer
17. Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans by Bill Schutt
18. Cotillion by Georgette Heyer (reread)
19. American Zion: a new history of Mormonism by Benjamin E. Park
20. The Reluctant Widow by Georgette Heyer (reread)
21. A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer

Books Completed Mar 2025

22. Miss Amelia's List by Mercedes Lackey
23. Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear
24. Economics : the user's guide by Ha-Joon Chang
25. Venetia by Georgette Heyer
26. The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer
27. Good economics for hard times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
28. Leaving everything most loved by Jacqueline Winspear
29. Raiders, rulers, and traders : the horse and the rise of empires by David Chaffetz
30. Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way by Roma Agrawal
31. A dangerous place by Jacqueline Winspear

Books Completed Apr 2025

32. Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear
33. Power and progress : our thousand-year struggle over technology and prosperity by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
34. The great wave : the era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider by Michiko Kakutani
35. Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty
36. In this grave hour by Jacqueline Winspear
37. To die but once by Jacqueline Winspear
38. The new financial order : risk in the 21st century by Robert J. Shiller
39. The American agent by Jacqueline Winspear

Books Completed May 2025

40. Doughnut economics : seven ways to think like a 21st century economist by Kate Raworth
41. Overcaptain by L. E. Modesitt Jr.
42. The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst
43. The Meaning of Beer: How Our Pursuit of the Perfect Pint Built the World by Jonny Garrett
44. 1637: the French correction by Eric Flint and Walter H. Hunt
45. Empty planet : the shock of global population decline by Darrell Jay Bricker and John Ibbitson
46. Chip war : the fight for the world's most critical technology by Chris Miller
47. Social origins of dictatorship and democracy; lord and peasant in the making of the modern world by Barrington Moore
48. The horse : a galloping history of humanity by Timothy C. Winegard
49. High-speed empire : Chinese expansion and the future of Southeast Asia by Will Doig

Books Completed June 2025

50. Babel : or the necessity of violence : an arcane history of the oxford translators' revolution by R. F. Kuang
51. The consequences of fear by Jacqueline Winspear
52. How to take over the world : practical schemes and scientific solutions for the aspiring supervillain by Ryan North
53. The coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
54. The beekeeper's apprentice: or, On the segregation of the queen by Laurie R. King
55. Uncovering dinosaur behavior : what they did and how we know by David Hone
66. Diviner's bow by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
68. The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time by Yascha Mounk

Books Completed July 2025

67. How the world became rich : the historical origins of economic growth by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin
69. A sunlit weapon by Jacqueline Winspear
70. Analytical development economics : the less developed economy revisited by Kaushik Basu
71. Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 by Robert W. Merry
72. The comfort of ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear
73. A peace to end all peace : the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East by David Fromkin
74. Penric's labors by Lois McMaster Bujold
75. How the world made the West : a 4,000 year history by Josephine Crawley Quinn
76. Imager by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
77. The dictionary people : the unsung heroes who created the Oxford English dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie
78. Imager's Challenge by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (reread)

Books Completed Aug 2025

79. Imager's Intrigue by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (reread)
80. The collapse of complex societies by Joseph A. Tainter
81. Scholar by L. E. Modesitt Jr (reread)
82. Princeps by L. E. Modesitt Jr (reread)
83. Scale : the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies by Geoffrey B. West
84. Imager's Battalion by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
85. The scientific revolution and the origins of modern science by John Henry
86. Antiagon Fire by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
87. Rex Regis by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
88. Madness in Solidar by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
89. Treachery's Tools by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
90. Assassin's Price by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)

Books Completed Sep 2025

91. The WEIRDest people in the world : How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Patrick Henrich
92. Endgames by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
93. The White Order by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
94. The signal and the noise by Nate Silver (reread)
95. Colors of Chaos by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
96. Iron kingdom : the rise and downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher M. Clark
97. The ship who won by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye
98. The Mongrel Mage by L. E. Modesitt Jr (reread)
99. Outcasts of Order by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
100. A culture of growth : the origins of the modern economy by Joel Mokyr
101. The Mage-Fire War by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)

Books Completed Oct 2025

102. The Third Reich in power by Richard J. Evans
103. Fairhaven Rising by L. E. Modesitt Jr (reread)
104. 33351507::Friends indeed by David Weber and Jane M. Lindskold
105. World fire : the culture of fire on earth by Stephen J. Pyne
106. Magi'i of Cyador by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
107. Scion of Cyador by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
108. Not by genes alone : how culture transformed human evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd
109. Wellspring of Chaos by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
110. Ordermaster by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (reread)
111. Rulers, religion, and riches : why the West got rich and the Middle East did not by Jared Rubin
112. Infinite life : the revolutionary story of eggs, evolution and life on earth by Jules Howard
113. The collapsing empire by John Scalzi
56*. Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty by Adam Kucharski

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

Books Completed Nov 2025

57*. Pox romana : the plague that shook the Roman world by Colin P. Elliott
58.* The language puzzle : piecing together the six-million-year story of how words evolved by Steven J. Mithen
59.* The consuming fire by John Scalzi
60*. War! What is it good for? : conflict and the progress of civilization from primates to robots by Ian Morris

Books Completed Dec 2025

61*. The hands of the emperor : a novel of the nine worlds by Victoria Goddard
62*. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper
63*. The eternal frontier : an ecological history of North America and its peoples by Tim F. Flannery
64*. The last Emperox by John Scalzi
114. The Third Reich at war by Richard J. Evans
115. Sub-majer's challenge by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

Books Pearl Ruled in 2025

1. The acid watcher diet : a 28-day reflux prevention and healing program by Jonathan E. Aviv
2. The Earth transformed : an untold history by Peter Frankopan
3. How to become the Dark Lord and die trying by Django Wexler
4. Technofeudalism : what killed capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis
5. Nemesis by Bill Napier
6. To each this world by Julie Czerneda
7. Foreign bodies : pandemics, vaccines, and the health of nations by Simon Schama

Abandoned without Prejudice in 2025

1. The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America by Mehrsa Baradaran

These are books that don't work for me right now. I might come back to them I'm less stressed, have a higher energy level, or similar.

It's the day after May Day; I'm late starting my second thread for the year. But here it is, though with some of the initial posts still lacking any content beyond a title.

Welcome Aboard!

Happy new thread Arlie!

Happy new thread, dear Arlie.

Happy new thread, Arlie!

>20 quondame: >21 PaulCranswick: >22 atozgrl: Thank you all, and may your weekend be enjoyable and relaxing.

Happy new thread!

>24 drneutron: Thank you Jim

40. Doughnut economics : seven ways to think like a 21st century economist by Kate Raworth

This is a book about ways to change economic thinking to make it more useful, and to an extent to better model the real world. The author sees the goal of economics not as being to encourage never-ending growth, but to help engineer a world where he human population lives within sustainable limits, while at the same time providing a decent living for all. (This is the doughnut of the title; it's not a book teaching economics using the model of a doughnut business.)

The ideas seem basically decent, and the author is IMO correct that it's unlikely that the entire population of the planet can ever live like the current western middle class - the current conventional charitable and developmental aspiration - let alone like the current 1%. We just can't produce - or dispose of - the amount of stuff that would be required, because the natural resources needed don't exist, and the waste products can't all be absorbed without excessive environmental damage, aka pollution.

The standard counterargument is, of course, "yes we can; demand will create supply, via highly motivated people creating technological innovations." This counterargument is not addressed here.

The other rarely expressed counterargument is "why would we want to do this; only the richest people matter - no problem if the rest die young, etc. etc." It's not hard to understand current US politics as resulting from people agreeing with that argument, except (sometimes) to the extent that it might affect them personally. But they still don't generally *say* it.

At any rate, I think the author's ideas are a good contribution to changing the discourse, giving people things to say other than "eat the rich" or "f*ck the neo-classical economic consensus".

Statistics:
- non-fiction, economics, series: n/a, 2017
- Author (Kate Raworth): female, Great Britain, born in 1970, economist (academic), author not previously read
- English, public library, 309 pages, 4 stars
- read Apr 17-May 5, 2025; book not previously read

41. Overcaptain by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 24th volume of the long and rambling Saga of Recluce, and the second volume following the military career of a man named Alyiakal. We saw him first as a boy, cadet, and then junior officer in From the Forest. In this book, he's senior enough for independent command, though there are many more ranks above him. (The sub-series will doubtless have aspects of Horatio Hornblower, except in a fantasy world's cavalry rather than at sea.)

I enjoy these books. I appreciate the author's practice of following someone's career - or the founding of some political unit - for two or three books - then moving far away in space and time for his next books. The people and places are often quite different from each other, yet still fitting in the same universe.

But this sub-series is one the author has done before - military officer, from boyhood onward - both in this series and others. In both of the cases I recall in the Recluce series, and at least two others from other series, the officer has magical or psionic abilities he is hiding. Moreover, either those hidden talents are unusually strong, or the officer is unusually creative in their use. Sometimes both.

Unfortunately, while I enjoyed this book - perhaps because I love the overall trope - it's not this author's best effort of this kind. There really isn't a book-length plot arc - instead, we have parts of 3 separate postings and time spent on home leave. Opposition is mostly weak - a superior officer who initially resents being assigned a deputy; mages who might see through his masquerade. Or it's present and much discussed, but nothing much happens not even much in the way of discoveries - thus the corruption of a powerful group of what amount to tax farmers. The emperor dies and is replaced, with the kind of plot devices that look like foreshadowing of a crisis involving our viewpoint character - but no such crisis erupts, at least none in this volume.

There are, as usual, lots of minutiae of daily life, clearly situating the story in a different world, rather than earth-with-magic-and-renamed-locations. But OTOH - I suspect it would be easy enough to translate those details back into normal earthly experiences - rename the foods, the social ranks, and similar, and you have nothing much surprising. Still, the details have the desired effect, much as do the details in Georgette Heyer's historical romance novels - where I also suspect some of the details wouldn't stand up to careful analysis.

I oscillated between a rating of 4 - because I ate it up like candy - and 3.5, because it wasn't either well done or especially original, particular as compared with the author's other works. I settled on 3.5.

By all means read it if you like this sort of story, though you might want to start at the beginning of the series, or at least with the first of the books about this character. But don't expect too much more than a nice light snack.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2024
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author frequently read
- English, public library, 487 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Apr 29-May 5, 2025; book not previously read

42. The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

This cozy fantasy novel was recommended to me by LibraryThing's new recommendation system. They missed. The book was readable and enjoyable, but not my cup of chai. Everything the characters experienced was far too easy. There were threats, but it became obvious early on that nothing bad would happen to anyone we've seen as a character, let alone to the lead and her side kick. There were slice of life descriptions - but the life was in a fantasy world I couldn't see as plausible. The lead character changed and developed - but there were major personality changes in only a handful of weeks. The economics plainly didn't work, not even the character's later method of making her living. etc. etc.

I don't want to give examples - I've spoiled enough already - but the level of sweetness and light was both implausible and cloying. I couldn't imagine being in these people's shoes, and not because of the major importance of magic.

On the other hand, I'm sure this would be to many people's taste, and wouldn't have felt off-the-charts positive in a book written for children. If you need an extreme antidote to current events, this book might well seem wonderful. Or if you really love chronicles of good things happening to good people, complete with slice-of-life detail.

Statistics:
- fiction, cozy fantasy, first of a series, 2024
- Author (Sarah Beth Durst): female, American, born 1974, novelist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 376 pages, 3 stars
- read May 6-9, 2025; book not previously read

>28 ArlieS: The cover of a Sarah Beth Durst book snared me some years ago, but I hadn't got a chapter into the boys leave home on adventure story, before I had to toss it for sheer trash world building.

>29 quondame: *sigh* Assuming she's not just a lousy writer, she clearly writes for people who don't care about world building.

Happy new thread!

>26 ArlieS: That looks interesting, Arlie.

>31 figsfromthistle: Thank you Anita

>32 PaulCranswick: I'm finally finding much better economics and economics-adjacent books. This was one of them.

>28 ArlieS: "Cozy" is becoming my marketingspeak alert for a very high probability of authorial laziness in some significant area of world-building, conflict limning, or characterization...not that infrequently a mix of all these.

It is, I think, inevitable that this kind of meaning-creep occurs. I'm choosing to see it as another opportunity to sharpen my awareness of my over-reliance on guidance from sellers.

>34 richardderus: When it comes to crime novels, I appreciate an indicator that the book is not yet another wallow in human misery and hopelessness, aka "noir". But what I really want is neither a "cozy" mystery nor a "noir" one. I want something more realistic/plausible than "cozy", but not such a downer as "noir". But with "noir" often not labelled - it's apparently now the generic mystery variant, and even more so with Scandinavian authors - I'll take what indicators I can get. Or better yet, focus on older books from authors who predate the fad for noir.

OTOH, if Sarah Durst is typical, I have no use at all for cozy fantasy. But maybe she's atypical?

43. The Meaning of Beer: How Our Pursuit of the Perfect Pint Built the World by Jonny Garrett

This is a book about beer in history and modern times, written by a beer enthusiast. It's got list of interesting historical tidbits previously unknown to me, which I appreciated. It's also got lots of tidbits about modern times; too bad it almost invariably presents them in the context of the author visiting some brewery or the other, usually including an interview over beer. All in all, a decent book, except it's by someone who cares too much about personalizing information in this way.

It was noticed on the new books shelf at the local library by my housemate, who suggested I might like it. Since she has a better hit rate than e.g. LibraryThing's new recommendation system, I promptly borrowed it.

One oddity: the sub-title provided by Amazon when I imported the book, by ISBN, was not the one plainly printed on the book's front cover and title page. The book *was* published in both the US and the UK, and that often results in differences - sometimes of title, not just subtitle. But the book I have before me says it is the American edition, and Amazon's subtitle read to me as more American - and less representative of the book's actual contents - so I can't really see it being the British edition's sub-title. Oh well, this is why I prefer not to use Amazon's record when any alternative is available; I'm pretty sure they alter titles routinely, though usually it's merely a matter of including the series name in the title.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, technology, and culture, series: n/a, 2024
- Author (Jonny Garrett): male, Great Britain, age unknown, journalist, author and filmmaker, author not previously read
- English, public library, 319 pages, 3.5 stars
- read May 3-12, 2025; book not previously read

>35 ArlieS: In my experience zdurst is bog-standard ordinary for that genre.

>37 richardderus: ycch!

44. 1637: the French correction by Eric Flint and Walter H. Hunt

This is volume 34 in the Assiti Shards series, published after the death of the primary author and series founder. I don't know how much Eric Flint had time to do for this story before his death - it could have been anything from chatting about the plot to writing a few scenes. I doubt it was more, yet it was published with him as the primary author. Walter H. Hunt is listed as the secondary author, but presumably did most of the work.

Unfortunately, Walter Hunt's writing is not as much to my tastes. I can't even say that the plot doesn't hang together - there is no real plot, just a setting, with various participants doing what makes sense to them in the situation, often independently of each other. To the extent that there is an actual plot, it remains unresolved, having merely reached a minor stopping point - i.e. it basically ends on a cliff hanger. It also fails to farther the main plot arc of the series, which had been a trademark of books in this series actually written by the series author.

The book also follows the popular modern practice of writing from the viewpoint of so many different characters that I wouldn't have a prayer of listing them all without spending an hour tabulating them from the book. Some number of them are involved in plots and counter plots. Threads of those get brought up and then often go nowhere. This may be realistic, but is it fun to read? I don't think so.

Add to this stupid behaviour from characters and implausibly effective behaviour from plotters. Not effective.

Some of the scenes were good, but this book is at best a curate's egg - "good in parts". I rated it 3, because there were parts I liked. But it confirmed my fear that farther entries in the series would be less and less worth reading, after the main inspiration died. I wouldn't buy this book even second hand. Don't bother, unless you are an out-of-control series completionist.

Statistics:
- fiction, alternate history, series (not first), 2025
- Author 1 (Eric Flint): male, American, born 1947, novelist, many books read in 2024
- Author 2 (Walter H. Hunt): male, American, born in 1959, novelist, author last read in 2021
- English, public library, 409 pages, 3 stars
- read May 6-16, 2024, book not previously read

>39 ArlieS: Oh dear. I liked the early ones, but kinda got lost around Grantville Gazette 6 or so. Just too much, too fast, I think since I love alt-hist.

Flint's death likely killed the project, but it hasn't been told to lie down yet.

>40 richardderus: Maybe it's running asynchronous software, like LibraryThing. See e.g. https://www.librarything.com/topic/368384

45. Empty planet : the shock of global population decline by Darrell Jay Bricker and John Ibbitson

The world's population is predicted to peak relatively soon, and decline thereafter. Most advanced countries are already failing to produce enough children to replace their population. Many developing countries are tending that way, or have already arrived. If current trends continue, it's reasonable to predict that they'll all reach this point. In time there will be an unusually large number of adults too old to work for each working age adult, just as there is already an unusually large number of working age adults per child.

I'd hoped this would be a book about coping with that reality, or even taking a cold hard look at its likely effects. Instead, the main message is that this is going to happen even sooner than e.g. the UN predicts, complete with lots of supporting detail.

A secondary message is that developed countries should accept as many immigrants as they can, while they still can, so as to delay and soften the predictable disproportionate amount of older people, unable to work and needing care. However, this is difficult - particularly effective assimilation. Few countries do it well; some can't do it or won't even attempt it. (The authors like what Canada is doing, and think the U.S. should emulate them.)

According to the authors, nations go through several demographic stages. They start with a high birth rate and a matching death rate. As they develop, life expectancy increases, most children survive until adulthood, but the birthrate stays high. Population balloons. But then a funny thing happens - the birthrate drops back to near replacement rate. If people don't need to have half a dozen children - or even a whole dozen - in the hopes that two live to have their own children - they mostly stop having them. So far so good, and this was something "everybody knew" even in the 1970s. What they may not have known about was the next stage - births drop below replacement rate, and keep on dropping, in spite of attempts to reverse the trend. Certainly this wasn't something I encountered in my reading at that time.

But now just about every advanced economy is below replacement rate. Japan is in the lead, with a noticeably shrinking population and an increasing median age. But other countries aren't all that far behind. China's one child policy lasted long enough that the average Chinese person only wants one child, even when they are free to have as many as they and their spouse want. In many countries, women have their first child late or not at all, and don't have time for many more, even if they want more. Some attempts have been made to encourage more children, and sometimes they even produce a blip that's visible in the statistics - but not a lasting rise above replacement rate,

The authors presume that the twin drivers of this are urbanization and the education and empowerment of girls and women. They see both as good things, obviously not to be changed to re-inflate the birth rate, even if that were possible. (Actually, I forget whether they even mentioned education; I may have got that one from other reading.)

The bulk of the book is devoted to trying to establish: (1) that later arrivals at this demographic transition progress through it faster, which implies that the countries still above replacement rate will drop below it faster than others did. And (2) most agencies making predictions don't account for this, so are predicting a more gradual fall than they should be. I don't see anything obvious wrong with this logic, but I don't have the relevant knowledge to spot cherry picking or other misleading arguments.

What I wanted more of was discussion of likely results, along with ways to deal with them, beyond "raise the retirement age". As it happens, I'm an oldie myself, and retired somewhat before my local official retirement age, in part because I could already see myself becoming less competent at the work I'd done since college graduation. I no longer have the energy to put in the needed hours of brain work. I'm somewhat "behind the times" and lack energy to self-update on my own time on top of a full time job. There were other reasons for retiring when I did, but it was a huge relief to stop pushing an increasingly heavy metaphorical rock uphill. Also, of course, there comes a time for all of us who don't die first when we can't work, and need increasing amounts of help coping with daily life.

IMNSHO, the only way to reduce the costs of supporting all those very old people is to reduce the amount of support each one gets. Give them chat bots instead of human connection. Require bureaucratic hurdles they can no longer surmount to get medical care. And cut their pensions to "save" whatever government pension program they contributed to throughout their working lives. (Sadly, there's a selfish political group in most countries eager to do just that.)

Unless, of course, there are unlikely medical breakthroughs that either restore function or at least delay loss of function. If the average 80 year old had the energy level, concentration, and physical ability of the average 40 year old, the problem would be solved, or at least postponed, and increasing the retirement age might well make sense.

But I digress - none of this is in the book. And that's my disappointment with the book - it doesn't talk about either how this might play out - what the problems would be - or how they might be usefully - though imperfectly - addressed.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, demographics (and economics, and politics), series: n/a, 2019
- Author 1 (Darrell Jay Bricker): male, Canada, born in 1961, CEO of "social and opinion research firm", author not previously read
- Author 2 (John Ibbitson): male, Canada, born in 1955, journalist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 288 pages, 3.5 stars
- read May 10-17, 2025; book not previously read

I heard about this book from a blog I follow, and decided it might well be worth reading.

46. Chip war : the fight for the world's most critical technology by Chris Miller

This is a history of digital technology, from transistors through the latest generations of microchips, and the tools to design and create them. It also discusses both Soviet and Chinese attempts to establish production and development in their own territories - the former historical, and the latter still current - along with attempts by the US and its allies to prevent this. There's a lot about individuals, with about as much emphasis on entrepreneurs and their funders as on scientists and engineers. Military applications get a bit more than their fair share of the space, if it were merely a history book, because of the author's concern about the wartime effects of a complex supply chain, with many chokepoints (single suppliers, or few suppliers all in the same country or region). Globalization is stressed, along with industry concentration - each particular relevant item has few suppliers, particularly if one wants the latest and greatest rather than older tech.

I lived through most of the period covered, so this is a history I've mostly been exposed to, but maybe not paid much attention to it in depth, being far more focussed on software than hardware. I knew the supply chains were very globalized, but not that there were choke points on pretty much all sides of any plausible major conflict. China's choke points have been in the news recently, but the U.S. still has more choke points than I'd realized, even without co-operation from US "allies" alienated by Trump's behaviour, particularly in his second term. Bottom line: in any extended conflict, "smart" weapons will get a lot dumber in pretty short order, in spite of any attempts at stockpiling in advance.

I read this book in a tearing hurry, after discovering on May 19 that I wouldn't be able to renew it on May 22 as planned, because some fellow library patron had put a hold on it. I enjoyed the book, and learned a fair amount while reading it.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, technology (history, microchips), series: n/a, 2022
- Author (Chris Miller): male, American, age unknown, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, public library, 431 pages, 3.5 stars
- read May 19-21, 2025; book not previously read

I pulled this book off the library's new non-fiction shelves, without any prior recommendation.

47. Social origins of dictatorship and democracy; lord and peasant in the making of the modern world by Barrington Moore

This book (published in 1966) is a sociological classic; Wikipedia describes it as "the cornerstone to what is now called comparative historical analysis in the social sciences". It was recommended to me by LibraryThing's classic recommendation system, and I acquired it by means of an inter-library loan.

I loved reading this book. The author writes the way I expect good authors of non-fiction to write, complete with indications of his level of (un)certainty, and all the footnotes and bibliographic references I could possibly want. There are no interviews, clothing descriptions, or other modern attempts at "relevance" and "humanization". The author is an academic, writing (I presume) for other academics as well as educated lay readers - not a journalist or self-conscious popularizer. I want to read much more like this.

The flip side of this being a delightful read is that the book is old. I was 9 when it was published. The author's arguments have almost certainly been superseded in places by the results of later research. There's also presumably a lot more detail available now. And with any luck at all, the same questions have been asked about the history of many more countries, probably with results that at best add nuance to the author's tripartite classification, and at worst pretty much vitiate it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, having so far said nothing about the contents. Moore looks at the process of what he calls "modernization" in 6 countries, 3 Western and 3 Asian, and advances a general theory based on this sample. I might instead call it the process of industrialization, and establishment of a money and wage-based economy, from a starting point that's mostly agrarian, mostly subsistence-based (producing for one's own consumption), and often feudal. (I can't call it the process of establishing a capitalist economy, as some of these countries wound up communist.)

Moore advances a theory about what kind of political system arises in each case: democratic, fascist, or communist, based in large part on the agrarian system in place at the start of the transition. I don't think any academic would dare such a generalization - from 6 examples - in modern times - but this book was written in the 1960s, by a scholar born in 1913. Also, I don't think he was as much trying to derive the pattern from his 6 examples, as use them to demonstrate the pattern he saw working out in them and others.

Overall a lovely read, for someone who shares my tastes, but almost certainly too dated to teach much about the sociological pattern. On the other hand, it has bits and pieces of history here that I hadn't encountered before, and found interesting for themselves. With regard to Japan in particular, I'm tempted to go find myself a detailed history book to build upon what I learned here.

Note that if this were 1967, or even 1975, rather than 2025, I'd have rated this book a 5.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 1966
- Author (Barrington Moore): male, American, born in 1913, academic (sociology), author probably not previously read
- English, public library (inter-library loan), 559 pages, 4 stars
- read May 4-23, 2025; book not previously read

>44 ArlieS: Barrington Moore! I quite loved A Critique of Pure Tolerance when I read in the 80s. It was not fashionable in Ronnie Ray-Gun/Hayek/Friedman times. Made it All the more appealing, I suppose.

>45 richardderus: I think you have just got me with a book bullet.

Again.

>46 ArlieS: ...and in your own thread...double points!

48. The horse : a galloping history of humanity by Timothy C. Winegard

This is a non-fiction book about horses. It's not a comprehensive history, but some of the sections chosen suggest an attempt to be comprehensive. I read it in chapter-sized chunks over the course of a month, whenever I found myself waiting for an appointment or similar.

It starts with a bit about the evolutionary history and context of horses; that's solid. Next stop, their domestication, with a suggestion I hadn't heard before that horses were in the process of dying out when humans adopted them as livestock, preventing their addiction. Then we read a lot about horses used in war, with emphasis on steppe nomads, first in Eurasia and later in North America. There's a bit about improve plowing in the middle ages, using horses in place of oxen, after development of more efficient horse collars. And then we're in the 20th century, with large cities drowning in horse excrement. Finally, we learn a bit about horses today - yep, they still exist.

In the course of learning about their domestication we are told that horses provided much faster transportation than humans had ever had before - apparently the author has never heard of boats, or hasn't realized that when conditions are right, water transport beats anything relying on feet, whether or not the feet are human. This sort of statement pops up again and again - either statements of equine superiority that seem non-credible, or rephrasing of past events to make the horses more prominent, perhaps more so than the humans. I think some of it was supposed to be funny, but it got old rather fast.

But my bigger complaint is that it's a book of selected vignettes, and the weighting seems more a matter of convenience (there's lots written about aggression by mounted nomads) and general appeal (everyone loves war stories) than relative importance. There's nothing about horse trading - another author claims the Silk Road should really have been called the Horse Road, with the silk and luxury trade merely incidental to the main business of horse trading. There's not much about horse breeding, horses specialized for different purposes, etc. There's little about polities that wanted horses (e.g. for war) but lacked land suitable for raising good ones. There's nothing about horse training. Much of the book reads like a general history of (parts of) humanity, with their horses emphasized a bit more than usual. I'd prefer it to have been more systematically about horses.

Net result: I finished it, but rated it at 3.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history (and biology), series: n/a, 2024
- Author (Timothy C. Winegard): male, Canadian, probably born in 1977, academic (history), ex-military, author previously read
- English, public library, 519 pages, 3 stars
- read April 20-May 25, 2025, book not previously read

I did not record how I came to read this book; probably it was recommended by one or both of LibraryThing's systems.

49. High-speed empire : Chinese expansion and the future of Southeast Asia by Will Doig

This is a short book about some aspects of China's One Belt, One Road initiative. There's a bit about the overall program, but more about specific projects in Asia, with especial emphasis on Laos.

The author is a journalist, and I suspect the emphasis comes from specific events he had earlier reported on as they happened. Thus for example we learn a bit more than you'd expect about the career of one particular Laotian leader/politician/ex-politician. We also hear stories of Chinese ex-pats and vacationers in countries like Laos. This works for me - think of it as "here's how the One Belt, One Road initiative looks like on the ground, in a particular place and time."

This was interesting to me; all I previously knew was extremely high level, not to mention filtered through American and British media.

It's also worth noting that the book predates the covid epidemic. China did some good hearts and minds outreach during that epidemic, providing covid vaccines to less developed countries who'd otherwise have none. One Belt, One Road is also at least partly - and publicly - about hearts and minds outreach. These days, the two come up in similar contexts. (And FWIW, I'm probably a bit more favorable to China personally, because of assistance they provided during covid - not to me - I lived in a favored, developed country which got the mRNA vaccines early - but to others I happened to know online.)

The author is suspicious of China's motives for One Belt, One Road, suggesting it's primarily about a mix of making profits for their own country and tying poorer countries to them in an unbreakable debt trap. (He doesn't mention other countries which have done the same with their development assistance, but the United States seems to me to be the elephant in the room.) I tend to figure their motives are mixed; it's not all selfishness with altruistic posturing for public consumption, but it's also not all or perhaps even mostly altruism. They are, after all, human.

Overall it's an interesting read, and I learned a bit about recent international relations, particularly in Asia.


Statistics:
- non-fiction, international relations, series: n/a, 2018
- Author (Will Doig): male, American, age unknown, journalist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 107 pages, 3 stars
- read May 24-27, 2025, book not previously read

50. Babel : or the necessity of violence : an arcane history of the oxford translators' revolution by R. F. Kuang

I wanted to like this novel, and I believe it's fairly well written. Unfortunately, it's a downer, thus failing as escapism. It also has a heavy dose of politics, and uses author's privilege to make the world - and human nature within that world - to be whatever they want. That's often, one way or another, what the author believes to accurately mirror ordinary reality. But in this case I can see the modern ideology that shaped the author's beliefs. And while that's not in itself unusual - there's somewhat of a cottage industry in e.g. books set in a libertarian 'reality' - it's not either my ideology, or something I can at least wish were true.

It's hard to describe the book without plentiful spoilers, not all of them easily available to anyone who reads publisher's blurbs. It's impossible to describe the bit that particularly annoyed me without spoiling just about everything, though it was at least foreshadowed in the novel, so unsurprising when it occurred. So here, goes, under a spoiler tag.

The action occurs in a British Empire where the Industrial Revolution depends on magic, and that magic depends on knowledge of multiple languages. Only a person with native or near native fluency in at least two languages can perform this magic. European languages are decreasingly effective, as they become closer and closer to each other. So scholastically bright mullti-lingual children are gathered up from all parts of the Empire, taught Latin and Greek, then sent to Oxford for farther training. Relatively good jobs await them, at least compared to anything else available to brown people in a racist empire. But their job amounts to supporting racial, national, and class dominance - putting white Britons out of work, making pots of money for the British upper class, enabling slavery (technically illegal in British territory), and never quite being accepted into that wealthy class themselves, unlike their white male peers. Similar opportunities are available to women, including British women - this is the only faculty at Oxford that admits either females or brown people.

We follow the life of a half-Chinese boy brought up in China until he's perhaps 10 years old, then claimed by his natural father (who never acknowledges paternity), to be trained for this program. Meanwhile his entire family dies in a cholera epidemic - though they could have been saved, using healing magic technology, if only it had been profitable. He loves learning, loves Oxford - but develops political consciousness. Eventually he, and a few others, suicidally - and temporarily - destroy the main site performing research and maintenance of this technology, thereby preventing at least an immediate start to the/an Opium War against China. One of his 4 classmates escapes before the final destruction, along with one other of the rebelling group. Another has already betrayed the group, which leads to the can't win suicidal situation. One other of the politically conscious translator magicians also survives.

There are two traitors in this story. Both are white British women, privileged except in terms of their sex, so sharing some of the experience of oppression - but siding with the establishment when the chips are down. The one we see most of enacts many of the stereotypes seen in e.g. White Fragility; the other betrayal was in the past, so we never see the details.

This smells like Identity Politics (TM), with a side order of True Oppression vs "those other people who aren't really oppressed." People who see me on the street generally class me as a White Woman (TM), so this little bit of casual stereotyping stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. There's an alliance with white working class rebels, and an attempt to cite their problems with the new tech, as the British electorate might at least sympathize with them, though never with brown people. But white women of privileged backgrounds? They can't be trusted. And to be fair, the alliance with white working class rebels feels like an alliance of convenience - when the chips are down, they aren't emotionally important to the rebelling translators. On the other hand, whether the translators are from India, China, or Haiti, their loyalty to each other is strong. Likewise, within the limitation that they must be brown, gender is not an issue - females and males work together.

Lots of this rather stuck in my craw - it wasn't a fun read, and I don't appreciate being cast as a "bad guy" by category. Robin diAngelo would say that's my privilege talking, and I need to read more of this sort of thing, to become a properly supportive "ally". On the other hand, I can see this read feel liberating to someone who identifies as a brown intellectual. And it will tend to confirm some fairly common cherished beliefs about non-brown people, which can be pleasant in itself. Also, it's a decent story line.

Finally, I seem to have conflicted emotions about stories of people not like me attempting to liberate their own people, even in conflict with villains that have lots in common with me. Without villains "like me", I'll simply identify with the lead characters. (That might be the result of being a member of a hegemonic group, of course.) OTOH, I dislike downers - I didn't like e.g. reading about Spartacus' failed rebellion, even in the form of a novel, because the viewpoint characters lose, and generally die. I'd have liked this book a lot better if more of the rebels had lived, and the results looked likely to be more than temporary. But maybe that's the best someone who's lived with oppression feels they can hope for, even in potentially escapist fantasy. Heavens knows, it seems as if any gains women made in my youth are in the process of being retracted by so-called conservative and populist politicians and their supporters.

Statistics:
- fiction, historical fantasy, non-series, 2022
- Author (Rebecca F. Kuang): female, American (born in China), born 1996, novelist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 544 pages, 4 stars
- read May 14-June 1, 2025; book not previously read

This book was recommended to me by LibraryThing's classic recommendation system.

>50 ArlieS: I have Babel on the shelves along with her books Yellowface and The Poppy War but I haven't really come close to reading any of them yet, Arlie, and your review gives me further pause!

51. The consequences of fear by Jacqueline Winspear

This is the 16th installment of the Maisie Dobbs series. It was quite readable, even enjoyable. But the author pulled a fast one that, for me, made it a failure as a mystery. Moreover, this is the second time she's pulled a similar stunt.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that once again people she works for and with know the answer, don't intend to act on it, and are watching her while she investigates, even communicating with her about it. The reader knows they don't want her investigating, but the rest only comes out at the very end.

Because of this little twist, the book is basically entirely about the heroine's psychological and personal development, and the lives of her and her friends. Worse, at least one person is endangered - and winds up hospitalized - as a result of assisting with this non-investigation. .

While the book is quite readable, even captivating at times, it gets a low rating from me because of the bait and switch. See also A Dangerous Place, volume 11 of this series, which pulls a similar stunt and got a similar rating from me in consequence.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction/mystery, series (not first), 2021
- Author (Jacqueline Winspear): female; British, born 1955, novelist, author of 9 other books I've read in 2025
- English, public library, 341 pages, 3 stars
- read May 18-June 6, 2025; book not previously read

52. How to take over the world : practical schemes and scientific solutions for the aspiring supervillain by Ryan North

This is a book of information, mostly science-based, organized based on the conceit of a supervillain wanting both their own lair/country etc. and to be remembered forever (or at least as long as possible)

I invented a new tag for this book: miscellany. I intend to use it for non-fiction books that seem to me to present a collection of (hopefully) facts, not organized in a way that strikes me as covering a genuine topic. The primary use will be for books that provide a collection of facts suitable for cocktail party chatter, without giving a structured, balanced look at any particular topic. (A recent example would be The horse : a galloping history of humanity, which IMO failed to provide a structured look at horses and their relationship with humans, instead emphasizing cool factoids along with particular sections of equine history.)

In this case, there is a structure, but the structure is kind of silly. All topics covered are relevant to the aspirations of a hypothetical super-villain, which run to having space they control - whether a lair or an entire country, and being remembered for increasingly improbable amounts of time.

Some of the facts are quite interesting - including coverage of areas I already knew a fair bit about. I especially enjoyed the discussion of the vulnerability of elections to computer hacking, addressed to the villain who aspires to gain their own country by "winning" its elections. Note, however, that this was not a balanced discussion of the problems - just a couple of highly relevant lessons - both already familiar to me, and perhaps to most people working in digital tech. I assume the other topics covered were equally unbalanced, even without already knowing e.g. details of international agreements that apply to Antarctica.

Overall, a nice light snack, if the cutesy pattern of addressing the reader as supervillain doesn't drive you a bit barmy.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, science miscellany, series: n/a, 2022
- Author (Ryan North): male, Canadian, born in 1980, writer (many graphic novels) and computer programmer, author not previously read
- English, public library, 388 pages, 3 stars
- read May 25-June 7, 2025, book not previously read

I'm not sure how this got on my list - probably either a library thing recommendation or a book bullet from a fellow 75-er.

>53 ArlieS: I'd avoid it because the narrative device would make me crazy in minutes flat, but I think the information sounds really interesting. It's more effective than a listicle at making connections among the data points, I guess.

>54 richardderus: I lasted through the whole book - but may have lost a couple of sanity points temporarily.

>55 ArlieS: It's one of those "show me on the doll where the book hurt you" kind of reading experiences.

53. The coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans

This is an excellent history of the downfall of the Weimar Republic and its replacement by Nazi fascism. It starts well before Hitler became political, and ends not too long after Hitler became chancellor by legal means. Subsequent volumes deal with Hitler's regime in peace, and then in war.

It was a highly informative read, teaching me a lot I hadn't known before. It's not the author's fault that I regularly stressed myself while reading it by comparing historical events in Germany with current events in the US.

There are in fact some pretty huge differences between now and then, notably the high level of routine political violence that was normal in that time and place. The brownshirts did not start the violence; they began as just one among many gangs of thugs associated with one or other political party or movement. There was also a broad - though not universal - consensus that the government was illegitimate, along with a desire to return to a real - and recent - monarchical past.

That said, history doesn't normally repeat itself; it merely rhymes. So neither differences nor similarities prove anything about what will happen in the US in the next few years. I don't get a simple formula to decide whether to relax my vigilance - or alternatively run like hell for the border, right away. But I'm now at least a little bit better informed about one way democracies can turn into dictatorships.

In any case, this book is better seen as a discussion of its topic, not as some kind of analogy for current events. It does that very well. There's a lot of good information crowded into a large but readable package. And on the way, he casually debunks various "truths" that everyone has heard. I was impressed to learn that there's good evidence that the Reichstag fire was the work of a loner, not either a false flag operation by the Nazis nor an attack by communists. Surprise! Likewise, I'd never before heard that Hitler's original involvement in politics was on behalf of the German military - basically surveillance work.

I look forward to reading the second and third volumes, which I will borrow as soon as my stack of borrowed but unread books gets a little bit more manageable.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2003
- Author (Richard J. Evans): male, Great Britain, born in 1947, academic (history), author previously read
- English, public library, 622 pages, 4.5 stars
- read May 22-June 15, 2025, book not previously read

This was a book bullet from drneutron.

>57 ArlieS: Nothing is ever as simple as the common wisdom makes it out to be. The entire purpose of historiography is to contextualize the facts to help the orthodoxy explain itself.

It's why we keep seeing new interpretations spring up as contexts change.

Certainty is seldom valid for long.

>57 ArlieS: I'm putting this on my TBR - after reading Eisenhower in War and Peace my interest in learning more about that period has been sparked. People who draw parallels of current events to notorious events of the past are more interested in advancing a political narrative than achieving actual understanding. There's plenty to be concerned about, of course. It's never a good idea to take our democracy for granted.

>59 ChrisG1: Enjoy!

>58 richardderus: I like reading the material for old as well as new contexts.

>60 ArlieS: As one should, and as becomes more and more challenging as knowledge bases and information analyses grow exponentially in quantity (quality is open for debate).

54. The beekeeper's apprentice: or, On the segregation of the queen by Laurie R. King

Is there a genre name for stories set in the universe of a well known author, now deceased, reusing their characters and/or setting? I've read a number of novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, or sometimes just Dr. Watson, either as a main character or as some kind of walk-on. I'm reasonably sure he's not the only character I've seen treated this way, but none occurs to me right now: except of course in fan fiction, which is pretty much defined by this practice, and in shared universe series, encouraged by the series originator.

This novel is firmly in that genre, featuring Sherlock Holmes as a very important character, mentor and later colleague of the viewpoint character, aka heroine. I enjoyed the book, but preferred the early parts to the final, largest segment.

On the other hand, the heroine, named Mary Russell, should probably have been named Mary Sue, though she does somewhat suddenly develop some weaknesses in that final segment, which are three presented as present all along though never mentioned.

I enjoyed the portrayal of a rich, intelligent but overly self-confident young woman, describing her own experience in ways that make her look as good as possible. She's the smartest person Holmes has ever met, except perhaps his brother Mycroft, or the villain Moriarty. She has money to burn - or will, once she comes of age and is released from the guardianship of her detested aunt. And she's got an ego the size of London. But she's witty and fun to read.

The last part, her first really dangerous case, wasn't as fun to read, as well as failing its plausibility die roll. (Yes, I know this is fiction, but fiction still needs to support suspension of disbelief.) I'll skip the spoilers and hence not explain why I had this reaction - but it was there, and cost the book between half a star and a whole one.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction/mystery/reuse of famous character, first of a series, 1994
- Author (Laurie R. King): female; American; born in 1952, writer, author not previously read
- English, public library, 347 pages, 3.5 stars
- read June 9-15, 2025; book not previously read

I failed to record why I picked this book to read; most likely it was recommended by Library Thing - found by searching among my recommendations for books tagged "fiction", or just possibly "mystery".

My collection of library books is once again failing to satisfy me. This time I think the problem is too much politics; I can only handle a small % of downer reading, and all politics at the moment is a downer for me, even when I agree with the author.

Or maybe it's just that after some years of having time to read all the books I want, I've used up some of my craving to read everything in sight. It may be time to get more selective, and thus read less.

Currently in progress: one novel that's headed for a 3, and one that may be headed for a DNF. One science book that's satisfying. One economics book that's often over my head. Two political books, one of which is preaching to the choir in my case. One history book that's trying hard to demonstrate things I already knew, but fortunately often using examples I didn't know. And a history book that while quite informative is full of incompetent imperialism, leading more or less directly to problems we have today.

The TBR pile of library books has 2 novels likely to be OK but not great, 3 books at the intersection of history and politics, one history of knowledge type book, and one that's basically humor.

Pearl Rule 3. How to become the Dark Lord and die trying by Django Wexler

I simply cannot care about this story, or the plot device behind it.

A human from earth is caught in a loop where she appears in a fantasy world, and goes back to the same starting point each time she dies there - like restoring from a saved game. Except she's sick of it, and especially sick of trying to be the world savior - or at least the savior of the human part of the world. So she decides to try becoming the leader of the other intelligent species, age old enemies of the humans. Yawn!

I suspect the plot borrows from modern Japanese fiction tropes. A friend who likes hentai considered this to be a fairly typical plot device.

Not my thing, and it wouldn't be improved, for me, if presented in the form of a graphic novel, complete with highly sexualized women.

--

Unfortunately, I failed to record why I borrowed this book. I suspect a Library Thing recommendation, probably from the new system, since the book is fairly recent (2024).

55. Uncovering dinosaur behavior : what they did and how we know by David Hone

This is pretty much what it says in the title: a book discussing what we know of dinosaur behaviour, and how we can determine such things. The author is a paleontologist - not e.g. a science journalist - so he knows what he's talking about. 400 endnotes in a section labelled "References" tell the reader where the information came from.

It's a good book, and hits my sweet spot for scientific content and an absence of "human interest". No discussion of politics either.

The bad part is how little we know, and how broad the topic - dinosaurs were presumably as varied as mammals, and mice don't behave much like ferrets, or elephants, or snow leopards. The book therefore is really about how various different dinosaurs behaved, to the extent that we know it. And it's organized by type of behaviour, not type of dinosaur - e.g. a chapter on reproduction, and another on feeding. It's also shorter than I'd have preferred - though I'm not sure whether there's material for more. But I kept wanting to go deeper into everything.

Net result: It's a good book but not a great one. Rated 4.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, paleontology, series: n/a, 2024
- Author (David Hone): male, Great Britain, age unknown, academic (paleontology), author not previously read
- English, public library, 207 pages, 4 stars
- read June 16-22, 2025, book not previously read

I borrowed this book after reading a review in the Inquisitive Biologist.

66. Diviner's bow by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

This is another in the long Liaden Universe series of science fiction/fantasy novels. It's got all the usual elements, complete with characters familiar from recent books in the series. The universe is much the same. But the book doesn't put it together quite as well as some of the others.

One problem is really short (3 page) segments from any character's point of view, before it skips to someone and usually also somewhere else. There's essentially one plot to the novel, seen mostly from the point of view of the good guys, but the jumping around makes it kind of hard to follow.

Related to that, using multiple identifiers for the same newly introduced character in the same 3 page segment - yes, the character was introduced as name, surname, title, but I get confused when the character is then mentioned once by name and a paragraph or two later by title.

The plot arc also felt like it could use some tightening up. Were the authors just trying to give a window into the lovely universe they've designed? Is the plot about violent local politics - that happens, complete with a culminating episode, but yet it seems minor within the rest of the novel. Is it about the Master Trader and his work to establish new trade routes? But there's almost no opposition there, or dramatic tension. Something's missing, possibly a really good editor - not for details like spelling and grammar, which are fine, but for flow and substance.

Net result: I'm rating the book at 3 - quite readable, but not as good as these authors have been in the past.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2025
- Author 1 (Sharon Lee): female, American, born 1952, novelist, joint author of 3 books read in 2024
- Author 2 (Steve Mille): male, American, born 1950, novelist, joint author of 3 books read in 2024
- English, public library, 453 pages, 3 stars
- read June 12-26, 2025, book not previously read

I read this book because it's one of a series I read as soon as my library gets each new book.

67. How the world became rich : the historical origins of economic growth by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin

I really liked this book - economic history and theories about economic development, without a side order of politics. The authors explicitly disclaim any discussion of whether the changes were good and bad, or who benefited and who lost. They also attempt to cover all the existing theories without evaluating them, before discussing their own theories. This approach suits me extremely well. I only wish the book had been longer, and the arguments a little bit more persuasive.

For most of human history and pre-history, most people lived at a bare subsistence level, usually with a few raking off any surplus to live in relative luxury. When things got better for any reason, more babies lived to have their own children, the population increased, and living standards soon dropped back to where they were before the positive change. Sustained improvements basically never happened. (There are some caveats in this story, but it's a good first approximation.)

This changed with the Industrial Revolution. The question, of course, is why did this happen at that time and in that place, rather than earlier, later, or somewhere else. Why didn't whatever improvement came first simply result in a larger population living at the same low level as before? Why has this process continued ever since, and spread to large portions of the planet?

This book focuses on that question. It explicitly ignores issues of fairness, justice, etc. - yes they were and are plentiful, but that's not the topic of this book. It tends to treat the change as overall beneficial, due to the net reduction in bare subsistence living worldwide. But it's more interested in asking why.

The best part, in my opinion, was the coverage of existing theories. The second part, advancing the authors' own explanations, seemed insufficiently persuasive to me, due to insufficient supporting data. Of course it's possible that such data simply doesn't exist; history can be like that.

The book has 24 pages of references - close to 10% of the book. In line references are used rather than footnotes, thus "Stasavage (2014) finds that ..." - one then looks for a 2014 book or article by Stasavage in the reference section. This means a quick skim might make it appear as if the book lacked specific support for its statements.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, economic history, series: n/a, 2022
- Author 1 (Mark Koyama): male, Great Britain (US permanent resident), age unknown, academic (economics), author not previously read
- Author 2 (Jared T. Rubin): male, United States(?), age unknown, academic (economics), author not previously read
- English, public library, 259 pages, 4 stars
- read June 29-July 4, 2025, book not previously read

I failed to record how this book got onto my TBR list.

I'm impressed enough that I plan to add books by either or both authors to my TBR, without waiting for someone or something to recommend them. I rated it only at 4, but that was for being too short, and IMNSHO insufficiently conclusive.

>67 ArlieS: I will look out for that one, Arlie. Good review.

I come from working class stock in West Ireland and Northern England and many of my antecedents struggled and suffered manfully due to the initial implementation of the industrial revolution - in the mills and the workshops and down the mines. But I do agree that it eventually reaped a wider benefit for many, whilst still leaving a lot of people behind.

>67 ArlieS: Of course it's possible that such data simply doesn't exist; history can be like that.

Succinctly formulated Truism, Arlie. Arguing from data grows exponentially harder the more time passes between the argument and the data.

>68 PaulCranswick: Enjoy!

>69 richardderus: I like your phrasing even better.

68. The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time by Yascha Mounk

This is a book about identity politics, particularly identity politics in the US. The author does not approve. He prefers something he calls "liberalism", aka the ruling principles of "liberal democracies".

There is, of course, no single source defining identity politics, or what Mounk calls the "identity synthesis". But there is a cluster of ideas that are currently prominent, with a decent sized group of often very vocal people subscribing to all or most of them.

The book starts with an intellectual history of these ideas, from academic theorizing: often highly nuanced and loaded with caveats, to nuance-free Truths one must endorse to be acceptable to certain political groups. The author makes clear that while he has some respect for the academic version, he has no use for the popular version, and considers it likely to be harmful to the very people it purports to endorse and support.

For me, this amounted to preaching to the choir.

But what is this "identity synthesis" anyway? Good question. I'm not clear on it even now. Here's a somewhat cynical summary, garnered from many experiences, not just this book, which possibly contradicts this book's summary in places.

One tenet of the identity synthesis is that only members of a particular group can have any understanding for the experience of other members of that group. Thus only black people know what black people need; every one else should support them - they are, after all, historically oppressed - but not be so crass as to even form their own opinions as to what help would be useful.

Racism - and other isms - are eternal. They can't be fixed, or even alleviated. So members of traditionally oppressed groups should isolate themselves from members of traditionally oppressive groups, if not also from members of other oppressed groups - particularly they should isolate their children from such experiences as diversity in their K12 classrooms.

Oppressed people must support each other, and their non-oppressed allies must support all of them. It's not OK to care about e.g. missing and murdered indigenous women without giving equal attention to black people, gay people, transgendered people. That's true even if you are yourself an indigenous woman whose sister or daughter are among the victims, let alone if you are merely a would be ally.

Identity status must be salient all the time. If I, a white person, know someone just like me - somewhat autistic software engineer that raised themselves from childhood poverty with the aid of scholarships - I must recognize that if they aren't white, I have nothing in common with them. A friendship is of course impossible. They should understand me the same way - this rule isn't just for historical oppressors.

The important point, from where I sit, is that all black people are the same, and should recognize it, just as all white people are the same - and it's not racist to not just acknowledge it as true, but demand that others do the same.

Another component, not stressed by this author, is that if I'm a member of a traditionally oppressed group, I should strongly prefer good things to go other members of my identity group, even if I get nothing. If black, I should prefer to see assistance going to rich black people to assistance going to poor people who aren't 100% black.

Moreover, if I'm white, I should strongly identify as white. (Identifying as e.g. Norwegian-American just won't do - I'm supposed to think of myself as simply "white".) Setting up a strong Us and Them dichotomy apparently won't increase my "racist" behaviour, contrary to much research.

As you can imagine, I don't think much of this ideology, which has become pervasive enough in some left wing circles that public disagreement with these Truths, or expressions of concern about side effects, can get you first instructed in the Truth, and if you persist - or people are having a bad day - excluded as an enemy to Truth, Right and Honesty, not to mention a Fascist, Trumpie, and unregenerate racist.

I was raised in a time when race-blindness was the ideal, along with individual rights. We looked forward to a time when race really wouldn't matter. Moreover, people would get what they individually had earned, not some allowance based on their group membership.

So the author was very much preaching to the choir with this book. That probably impaired my ability to think critically, not to mention my ability to remember what in the above description came from this book, and what came from background knowledge.

Nonetheless, I retain a vague sense of having smelled a rat or three. I suspect the situation is overstated, with only the worst examples given.

That gets stronger in the last chapter, "A Brief Case for the Liberal Alternative". "Liberal" has been used in far too many senses. These days, it's often a synonymn for libertarianism, with a side order of globalism. The behaviour of historically liberal political groups has included lots of things I don't approve of. I'd like to see some of the ideals of my youth get more air time - but not at the expense of ignoring valid criticisms, some of them coming from the same intellectual sources as this "identity synthesis". I didn't analyze that chapter enough to figure out what specific aspects of "liberalism" the author favors, and what negative consequences were being swept under the proverbial rug - but I did detect a certain amount of rodent fragrance.

Still, it's a good book, and the "identity synthesis" in its more extreme forms could benefit from a whole lot of push back. Moreover, the historical sections taught me things I didn't already know.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2023
- Author (Yascha Mounk): male, West Germany (naturalized American citizen), born in 1982, academic (international affairs) and journalist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 401 pages, 4 stars
- read May 22-June 28, 2025, book not previously read

This book should have been #67, with the one reviewed as #67 being numbered #68, based on the dates I finished reading each of them.

It was recommended to me by LibraryThing's new recommendation system.

Abandoned without prejudice #1: The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America by Mehrsa Baradaran

I'm abandoning this book because it all too reliably makes me upset, and I don't have the emotional energy to deal with books like that. Some of the ideas are interesting, but it's not worth increasing my stress level.

--
This book was recommended to me by LibraryThing's new recommendation system.

69. A sunlit weapon by Jacqueline Winspear

This is volume 17 of the Maisie Dobbs series. This series features mysteries set in the United Kingdom, starting some time after World War I, and progressing through World War II and a bit beyond. I've been reading my way through them. This volume was set in World War II.

I enjoyed the book enough to rate it at 4.

At the same time, I couldn't help noticing the ways it made Britain look good socio-politically to modern eyes, particularly compared to the US. We see both female pilots transporting planes for the RAF - never armed ones, or combat missions, but still risky as well as highly skilled. And we see British people uniformly reacting somewhat unhappily to the way the US treated their black soldiers.

I've seen both themes before - in one case, in a book by Nevil Shute written pretty much in the same generation as the war. So this is not just pandering to modern blue tribe tastes. But having the two together caught my attention, and not in a great way.

Still, it's a decent read, or perhaps a bit better, and historical fiction is full of ethics and mores more appropriate to the time when the book was written than the time when the action supposedly occurred. This is just more of the same.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction/mystery, series (not first), 2022
- Author (Jacqueline Winspear): female; British, born 1955, novelist, author of 10 other books I've read in 2025
- English, public library, 359 pages, 4 stars
- read June 26-July 25, 2025; book not previously read

70. Analytical development economics : the less developed economy revisited by Kaushik Basu

This is, essentially, a textbook for a graduate-level class on the economics of "less developed countries". It was obvious from the introductory part of the book that I lacked the needed background, but I persevered, learning rather more about the types of things economic theorists look at and attempt to model, than precisely how their models work.

Nonetheless, reading it felt worthwhile, even though there were times when felt that some of these were rather far from contact with human lived reality. (It could have been worse - a lot worse in fact - while the book is intentionally theoretical, it chose its topics with one eye on real world, observational/empirical results - unlike, AFAICT, most presentations of economics 101.)

Statistics:
- non-fiction, economics, series: n/a, 1997
- Author (Kaushik Basu): male, India, born in 1952, academic (economics) and economic advisor, author not previously read
- English, public library, 366 pages, 3.5 stars
- read May 4-July 12, 2025, book not previously read

I failed to record how this book came to be on my TBR; most likely, I found it in the bibliography of some other book I liked.

Pearl Rule 4. Technofeudalism : what killed capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis

The first chapter of this book was great. The second chapter became annoying and hard to follow. While the ideas expressed here - as described on the back cover - have the potential to be interesting - I don't have the patience to dig them out of extended metaphors, while taking the emotional hit of being reminded ad nauseam of all the bad things in the world.

I get it that some readers want to feel indignant, and therefore love consuming reports of bad behaviour, bad consequences, etc.. Perhaps they also lack the ability to think about theory, let alone about statistical data, and pick what to believe based on the emotional resonance of the stacks of examples presented. Or they've already decided, based on important matters like what their "tribe" believes, and need the emotional reinforcement to remain loyal to their tribal Truth.

I on the other hand, just get headaches.

I remain curious about the underlying theory: that aspects of the digital world have changed the world economy to have more in common with feudalism than capitalism. (In particular, the ability of tech lords to collect "rents" off of ordinary people's daily life.) But I suspect it will just be yet another extended metaphor, like the Minotaur that made my head metaphorically explode in chapter 2.

Meanwhile, the author's metaphor kind of spoke to my experience. Several profit seeking assholes abused my cellphone to interrupt me even in the short time it took me to record and review my previous entry in this thread. I received 8 or 9 emails and several texts last night, about PG&E's latest local outage - all ultimately from PG&E itself, by various intermediaries. I regularly get not just useless to me requests to fill out surveys, but reminders of requests I deleted on sight. I get it that from the POV of any tech company, you and I exist only to be advertised at, both by them and by those who buy the data they collect about us. We mostly aren't even useful to them as workers, contributing to their bottom line by selling them our time; instead, they simply take it. But of course that makes us livestock, not serfs - serfs were expected to work for their lords.

However, while he can be an engaging writer, as his first chapter showed, he does a lot better talking about his family than talking about economics or politics.

I'm running low on library books; time to select and acquire more.

This time I started with Library Thing's recommendations - from both systems - and was a bit surprised at what didn't turn up. My positive experience with The Coming of the Third Reich and its author Richard J. Evans was not enough to get the second and third volumes of that series recommended.

Pickings are seeming very thin this time. You folks need to get busy firing book bullets at me. also, my local libraries need to acquire a lot of the ones that have long been recommended to me, that aren't attractive enough for me to spend real money on them. Also, in e.g. the case where I found 27 holds on 2 copies, plus 24 more on the ebook version, the library might want to get a couple of other copies.

>75 ArlieS: Maybe I'm that much more in his tribe than you are, but this was an excellent read for me. Your examples of how your tech interactions go explicates how very much I was those like Yanis to take over the thinking for The Masses℠ instead of that fuck Zuck, Edolph Twitler, et alii.

>77 richardderus: I'm probably too sensitive to world-is-ending narratives, or even emphasis on the bad. But given that I am "triggered" (modern usage, trivializing folks with PTSD) pretty easily, I find it useful to manage my reactions by minimizing such input.

71. Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861 by Robert W. Merry

This book does exactly what it says on the tin: describes the political history leading up to the US Civil War, with emphasis on the roles of Massachusetts and South Carolina, homes of the most radical and most intransigent opinions on the subject of slavery.

To my surprise, the author is a journalist rather than a professional historian. His journalism was focussed on US politics, writing for relatively high brow publications. I guess that gave him good general knowledge of the way the political sausage is made. And the high brow audience apparently taught him to avoid blatant bias and appeals to emotion. Or maybe he was always that rare person who goes into journalism with an attitude more like an academic than a typical journalist.

At any rate I liked the book a lot - unusual for me and books written by journalists. I also found it quite informative, in spite of already having done some reading in this area.

I was, by the way, quite pleased that the book ended when the battles started. I've read more than enough about the actual war; this was more inetresting (to me).

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2024
- Author (Robert W. Merry): male, United States, born in 1946, journalist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 514 pages, 4.5 stars
- read June 24-July 14, 2025, book not previously read

>78 ArlieS: A wise choice. I'm still looking for illustrations of the "-core" concept, and will post them on my thread when I find ones I feel confident get the idea across. Of course I'll come tell you!

72. The comfort of ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear

This is volume 18 of the Maisie Dobbs series, which I've been reading through over the last two years. Sadly, it's projected to be the final installment, though the author might change her mind.

This volume felt a little bit as if two stories were glued together, back to back, presumably so as to finish the preplanned series plot arc on schedule, without yet another book - or because the second plot simply wasn't big enough for a full novel. I see this sort of thing a lot from authors of long, successful series - eventually they are filling in the grand series story more than writing taut, focussed individual novels. But in this case the two stories worked, in spite of the weird focus change 2/3 of the way through the book.

I was less happy about foreshadowing that the second one was due to end badly - since it didn't. Probably the concern that it would was being amplified to provide some tension in what was basically a straightforward feel good plot.

But these are nits. Overall, the book was enjoyable, and fit within the expected parameters of the series. it wasn't great, in part because of these nits, but it was good enough.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction/mystery, series (not first), 2024
- Author (Jacqueline Winspear): female; British, born 1955, novelist, author of 11 other books I've read in 2025
- English, public library, 365 pages, 3.5 stars
- read June 26-July 25, 2025; book not previously read

>78 ArlieS: I've done my best to give you a "-core" education here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/372273#8903490

>82 richardderus: Thank you

I have acquired the first of my next batch of library books. Perhaps coincidentally, they all weigh in at more than 300 pages, and the largest weighs in at 941. Only the shortest book is fiction.

Penric's Labors 326 pp fiction
A culture of Growth 403 pp
The weirdest people in the world 680 pp
Iron Kingdom 776 pp
The Third Reich in Power 941 pp

I had planned to also borrow a bunch of L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s novels to reread, but my back wasn't up to it, so I'll pick them up when my holds and inter-library loan requests come in.

We visit the more distant local library system next Thursday; books I've requested there are gradually trickling in from other branches, so I can pick them up all at the same branch.

p.s. I recommend walking to libraries and returning with books like Iron Kingdom and The Third Reich in Power, if you want to build or retain a bit of core strength.

73. A peace to end all peace : the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East by David Fromkin

This history book recounts the saga of incompetence, bureaucratic conflicts, and greed that led the British government - and to a lesser extent its World War I allies - to create the running sore now known as the Middle East, out of mostly Arabic speaking territories which had been part of the Ottoman Empire.

The British displayed near complete cluelessness about the area and its inhabitants, their goals and what they would or would not find acceptable. They fell for con artists. Bureaucratic fiefs enacted their own policies, ignoring orders from the central government. They couldn't even manage an invasion properly, between the inept admiral and the several inept generals.

Meanwhile, they knowingly made promises they had no intention of keeping, as well as others they proved incapable of keeping due to changing circumstances.

Now some of this is the stock in trade of all governments, particularly those of powerful countries, particularly when in colonialist mode - i.e. dealing with non-peer nations. But the story here is impressive even by those standards. I've been using this history as my go to sound bite example for a government generated clusterfuck.

As a proper modern person, I should also mention imperialism, complete with contempt for the locals as incapable of ruling themselves. But frankly, that's just the cherry on top of the steaming pile.

However, they did make all the usual mistakes, or creating political units that didn't match local loyalties and affiliations, plus the extra one of half-support of Zionism.

Very impressive. I'll never think of Winston Churchill with respect again, in spite of his record in World War II - years after the events in this book. But he was only one of a bunch of people who don't come off at all credibly. What a collection of Great Leaders(TM), aka entitled, bloody damn fools, equally bereft of cluefulness and ethics. They almost make Andrew Jackson look good.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 1989
- Author (David Fromkin): male, United States, born in 1932, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, public library, 635 pages, 4 stars
- read May 27-July 21, 2025, book not previously read

This book qualifies for the Big Book Challenge.

I have finally created a spread sheet for tabulating everything I read in 2025, and added my first two books and their authors.

The holdup was that I changed how I plan to tabulate author statistics, with the result that I couldn't just copy my 2024 spread sheet; I had to reprogram about half of it.

That's now done; I'll no longer count e.g. birth year 5 times for an author I happen to read 5 times in one year.

74. Penric's labors by Lois McMaster Bujold

This book contains 3 novellas in the Penric and Desdemona series. I like this series - and indeed, most of what his author writes.

These novellas are Masquerade in Lodi, The Orphans of Raspay, and The Physicians of Vilnoc. I enjoyed all three, tearing through the book in a mere 2 days.

This series features a world in which the major religions worship 4 or 5 deities. The 5th one, known as The Bastard, among other names, is the patron of odds and sods that don't fit proper normal society - literal bastards, queers, prostitutes, executioners, etc. Some areas don't recognize this 5th deity, and persecute his worshippers, or indeed anyone who acknowledges his existence. Others worship all 5.

There are other stories set in this universe, outside of this series, but the Penric and Desdemona series all feature a common character, Penric, who somewhat inadvertently became a priest of the 5th god - by becoming host to a "demon" - demons and their relationship with humans being part of this god's domain. They also feature his demon, Desdemona.

The stories tend to be funny, and usually involve a problem in need of solution, with or without the help of Penric's god. In some ways, things are worse when the god is involved, which adds to the humor.

Penric himself is prone to overwork as well as overachievement; the overwork is very much on display in The Physicians of Vilnoc. The Orphans of Raspay shows us what kind of trouble a demon can create, when the god's ethical strictures allow it. And Masquerade in Lodi is basically a mystery, enlivened by a young and somewhat mischievous saint of the 5th god.

The set was a very tasty light snack, with ethical issues sometimes lurking in the background.

---

Unfortunately Bujold generally initially publishes members of this series as e-books, which I do not like - particularly if they come complete with Digital Rights Management (DRM) - so I haven't bought any of them in rather a while, and won't even borrow them from the library in e-book format. So that's why I've only now read entries 4 and 9 in a series that already has 9 offerings. (#8 is also in the volume I just read; it was the last case where I broke down and paid for an e-book - or perhaps acquired it as a free teaser.) Obviously YMMV with regard to e-books.

I prefer to own books I can't be retroactively locked out of reading, or possibly (not sure of the tech) find "revised" and "improved" between readings, like all modern software. I prefer a user interface (turning pages) I learned in childhood, that can't be "improved" overnight. And I prefer reading paper, held more or less horizontally, to reading on a vertical monitor, complete with glare. Even the possibility of expanding the character size on an e-book, producing a large print experience, hasn't tempted me back to ebooks, except when traveling and needing to limit total weight. And that's before I rant about novella-sized ebooks with doorstop-sized prices.

So I'm quite frustrated that there are 4 more novellas published but not available to me for who knows how long. At least when books came out in hardback - which I also generally refused to purchase - I could reasonably expect them out in paperback eventually, often after a quite predictable delay.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, series (not first), stories (3 novellas), stories: 2019, 2020, 2020 - book 2022,
- Author (Lois McMaster Bujold): American, born 1949, novelist; many books read, but this is my first in 2025
- English, public library, 326 pages, 4 stars
- read July 21-22, 2025; book not previously read

I read this book because I grab these stories as soon as they become available on paper, preferably from a library.

75. How the world made the West : a 4,000 year history by Josephine Crawley Quinn

This largish book tells the history of the West, from ancient times until the Age of Exploration. The focus is on influences from outside the traditional Sumeria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, followed by Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

The author seems to expect these other influences and interdependencies to be news to her readers. They weren't news to me, except for some specific detail - I knew the broad picture all along was people get around, trade happens, influence happens. And I also knew the corollary that the often racist idea of a specifically European cultural stream, distinct from other streams, was nonsense unsupported by the available evidence.

So for me, this read as yet another history book, adequate but neither especially good or especially innovative. Hence my rating of 3.5.

You could do a lot worse if you wanted to read about this history. But the law of averages suggests you could quite possibly also do better.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2024
- Author (Josephine Crawley Quinn):female, Great Britain, born in 1973, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, public library, 572 pages, 3.5 stars
- read May 27-July 28, 2025, book not previously read

This book qualifies for the July edition of the Big Book Challenge. Do I need to choose between it and my #73 ? ;-)

I failed to record how the book got onto my TBR list.

76. Imager by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the first book in a fantasy series by an author I like. I've decided to reread the series, which I first read in 2019. The series takes place in a fantasy world which is vaguely Victorian in tech level, except for the presence of a rare psionic/magical talent called "imaging".

This volume is pretty much a bildingsroman, following a young man from boyhood to the discovery of his imaging talent and his early training in the use of that talent.

It's hard to review fiction adequately without spoilers, so I'm not going to try too hard. I enjoyed it. But I'm a sucker for stories about the young and powerful finding their feet, and for stories that do a good job of immersing the reader in an imagined world, complete with food, religion, social customs, and even politics. Someone without these tastes might not like it as much.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, first of a series, 2009
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41 for 2025
- English, public library, 432 pages, 4 stars
- read July 26-29, 2025; book previously read

>89 ArlieS: Imager and its immediate sequels are among my favorite of Modesitt's "recent" fiction. Although sometime after my initial reads, my willingness to accept mass slaughter on the part of a "good" character declined steeply.

>90 quondame: Yeah. These books show Modesitt as very cynical about what's even possible for humans and in government. The best one can do is a choice between evils, and often involves committing evil of one's own.

77. The dictionary people : the unsung heroes who created the Oxford English dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

This is a book about some of the people who worked on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, by a modern academic who worked on more recent edition(s) herself.

The focus is on the wide variety of volunteers, particularly those who'd seem surprising, to modern readers. (The dictionary relied heavily on crowdsourcing of citations for word usage.)

It's a fun book of anecdotal style descriptions of individuals and groups of individuals with some characteristic in common, organized into a chapter for each letter of the alphabet, with titles like "Z for Zealots" or "M for Murderers". It's not all information about specific contributors; they are sometimes treated as groups. And we also hear a lot about the editors organizing the effort.

While it wasn't quite what I expected, or for that matter my usual style of book, I enjoyed it.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2023
- Author (Sarah Ogilvie): female, Australia, age unknown, academic (linguistics), author not previously read
- English, public library, 370 pages, 3.5 stars
- read July 18-30, 2025, book not previously read

This book was borrowed from the library by my housemate. It looked interesting to me, so when she'd finished it I decided to read it myself before returning it.

78. Imager's Challenge by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

This is the second book in the Imager Portfolio, a fantasy series which I am happily rereading. It continues the story in the first volume, my #76 for this year.

As with all fiction, it's hard for me to describe without spoilers, but I enjoyed it and rated it at 4.

One thing I do notice in this series, is the way that the protagonist replicates behaviours and social structures he disliked as a younger person. We already see him treating younger people much as he was himself treated, and that becomes a lot more pronounced in the third volume. I think the author is more than a bit cynical about the human condition - and quite possibly also right.

FWIW, the protagonist is, politically, somewhat like me - change can be needed, but tearing everything down is not, and sometimes the law requires or allows some pretty bad behaviour.

Fortunately my life - and indeed, my legal environment - is a lot less violent - and moreover I don't work in law enforcement. So I don't have to take the kind of risks - and do the kind of direct harm - that he winds up doing.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2009
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41 and #76 for 2025
- English, public library, 432 pages, 4 stars
- read July 26-29, 2025; book previously read

79. Imager's Intrigue by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

This is the third book in the Imager Portfolio, a fantasy series which I am happily rereading. It continues the story in the first and second volumes, my #76 and #78 for this year.

It is the last of this sub-series; the next volume in the series tells the story of a different person in the same universe, hundreds of years before the time of the first three volumes. This is classic Modesitt; he tells a story in one or more books, then keeps the universe but moves to an unconnected person with different challenges, often far away from the previous one.

As with all fiction, it's hard for me to describe without spoilers. It continues the story of the young man in the second volume, after a 5 year hiatus and the birth of a child. (I don't recall whether he married at the end of volume 2, or had merely cleared the obstacles to his marriage to the woman he'd been involved of since volume 1.) We see a lot of his domestic life, including his little girl catching whatever minor bug is going around, and upending his domestic arrangements for a week or two. But all this is just setting, not really part of the plot, but helps make the world seem solid.

Other than that, and at the risk of spoilers, our hero proves in volume 3 to be seriously overpowered, the kind that appears only once in a few generations. People find him rather frightening, and pursuing his story would require enhancing the opposition beyond plausibility, breaking the integrity of the world design. This is a mistake that Modesitt avoids by writing no more about such a character, and instead moving to an entirely new one.

Overall I enjoyed this book, and rated it at 4.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2010
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41, #76 and #78 for 2025
- English, public library, 495 pages, 4 stars
- read July 31-Aug 3, 2025; book previously read

80. The collapse of complex societies by Joseph A. Tainter

This is a very good book, offering a theory of why - and when - societies collapse into simpler forms.

He begins by exploring what it means for a society to collapse, as compared to short term crises, failed take-offs, and similar. (Thus, for example, Alexander the Great's Empire didn't "collapse" in this sense - it simply failed to establish institutions that would let it outlast its founder.) He's careful to be as general as possible, and to include collapses from relatively simple societies (chiefdoms, perhaps) into something even simpler.

He then explores existing theories of collapse, many of which are less than general - they simply address one specific collapse. He groups these by theme, with some critical feedback.

Finally, he develops his theory, and applies it to three examples - not all of which left written records that we can understand.

I enjoyed the writing, and the attitude, perhaps even more than the theory. This is the kind of non-fiction I like. The theory is interesting too, but I don't feel qualified to evaluate it, except as "plausible", and I find my attempts to explain it leave obvious holes. There's also the concern that the book was published in 1988 - there may well have been significant new discoveries about any of his three examples.

So I'm not a convert per se, and I'd like to read other scholars' reactions to the book. (Too bad it can be hard to locate such things, without a helpful academic librarian.)

However, the book is well worth reading. I think it's also somewhat of a classic in its field. IIRC, I discovered its existence via the bibliography of some later work. It then took me rather a while to locate a copy.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, historical theory, series: n/a, 1988
- Author (Joseph A. Tainter): male, American, born in 1949, academic (anthropology), author not previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 250 pages, 4.5 stars
- read July 26-Aug 3, 2025, book not previously read

A belated congratulations for passing 75 already Arlie. xx

>96 PaulCranswick: Thank you, Paul.

81. Scholar by L. E. Modesitt Jr

This is the fourth book in the Imager Portfolio, starting a new sub-series, set a long time (centuries) before the first three volumes.

This sub-series tells the story of the origin of some of the institutions seen in the first sub-series. It is not, however, a fill-in-the-blanks book for series completionists - Modesitt basically never does that. Instead, it's a jump back in time, where people have their own goals and set about addressing them. and it doesn't go into detail, or probably even complete the story of these institutions - just gives us insight into the path-dependent way they arose - in what's of course an imaginary world with an imaginary culture.

At the time of this story, people with the imaging talent are generally feared and often hated, most concealing their abilities for their own safety. It's hard to learn how to use the talent - teachers and even written instructions are hard to find - learning is mostly by guesswork, and often dangerous.

In this book, we follow the adventures of a young man, a scholar and concealed imager, who is sent by his monarch to look into the situation in a distant province, relatively recently conquered (by the monarch's father), and still requiring an expensive troop presence. The young man is highly intelligent and unusually talented as imagers go - typical of Modesitt heroes, who are never just ordinary.

Naturally the situation is both complicated and dangerous, allowing plenty of room for adventure.

I enjoyed the book, and the resolution, but will say no more for fear of spoilers.

As with most Modesitt books, we also get to experience normal aspects of life in this alternate world, in a way that makes it seem particularly real. If there are errors in the medieval tech level details, they aren't obvious - but OTOH, I haven't gone looking for those mistakes. Suspension of disbelief is more than easy.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2011
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41, #76, #78 and #79 for 2025
- English, public library, 508 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 3-7, 2025; book previously read

82. Princeps by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the fifth book in the Imager Portfolio, the second of the second sub-series. The hero of Scholar is promoted to Princeps at the end of the first volume - effectively vice-governor, with emphasis on logistics - and begins Princeps in that role. He is, however, soon given a different assignment - perhaps that assignment would have made a better name for this book.

In that assignment we see a man struggling to do what's right in a sea of corruption, and doing a decent job. He's then replaced and moved to an entirely different role, which he finds himself often having to invent as he goes along.

I enjoyed the book, but will say no more for fear of spoilers.

One correction: in my review of Scholar, I described the tech level as medieval. I was wrong: it's closer to Renaissance, at least in terms of military technology. Also, of course, there's the Imaging talent, but that's really too rare to count as affecting the tech level.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2012
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41, #76, #78, #79 and #81 for 2025
- English, public library, 496 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 7-11, 2025; book previously read

83. Scale : the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies by Geoffrey B. West

This book is an attempt to communicate to lay people a pattern of relationships intelligible only mathematically - without including any equations. The author tries to replace the equations with graphs - but commits multiple errors of labelling, such that the impression I got was that he was either unforgivably sloppy, or actively attempting to deceive the readers. He also frequently either makes general statements that I happen to know don't apply as broadly as he stated, or gives the one example where I'm sure the relationship applies, phrased to make it seem like a stand in for all similar cases.

Sometimes the text is more accurate than the diagram - such as a graph described in the text as showing mammals, mislabelled as showing animals. (AFAIK, the pattern shown applies among mammals, and among birds, but not if you combine the two, and probably doesn't apply to any cold-blooded animals, such as amphibians and reptiles.)

The blurb basically describes the author as the second coming of Einstein, with Newton, Galileo and others thrown in for good measure. He's a theoretical physicist (all bow), so is self-evidently a reliable source on economics, demographics, mammalian biology, and anything else he cares to address (sic).

Needless to say, my snake oil alarm was clanging loudly enough to give me a headache. Yet when I checked for suspicious factors, I didn't find many. The author is not selling things to those convinced by his theories. The book is published by Penguin, not self-published or otherwise dodgy. The author has published some of his work in well regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as Nature. He has a wikipedia page, which doesn't reek of controversy, except that the careful phrasing in the biography section suggests that he may have failed to finish his doctorate at Stanford. I suspect he failed at theoretical physics, and took his mathematical training into a new and fairly wide open field, where he did good work.

This book would then be an attempt to communicate that work to a non-mathematical audience. I was clearly not the target audience. I still remember basic high school algebra, which is all you'd need to understand his work - though a bit of basic statistics might also help. And I react very badly to people telling me The Truth (TM), without clear explanations of the evidence, while simultaneously loudly blowing their own horn. Why should I believe that this author's statements are any more reliable than those of any other author? Given that I found errors in his work, how can I trust anything else in it? Add to this various other unfortunate writing habits, such as long digressions (fortunately identified as such), and you have a recipe for a DNF. But some of the ideas are interesting, and might well be true. So I persevered.

As for the content: the subtitle more or less accurately describes it. This is all about regularities seen as size changes - in living creatures, cities, and businesses. In general, doubling one factor doesn't result in doubling the dependent factor - it might instead tend to be multiplied by about 1.5 or by about 2.7, or any other number that's not quite 2. But that would be consistent, from smallest, to twice that size, to four times that size, to the very largest known - with a bit of fuzziness around the edges. Not everything shows this sort of regularity - but it shows up in more places than one naively expects. And in some cases, there's a good logical explanation for the pattern - sometimes involving fractal space filling.

The author and his institute has done some of the research in this area - perhaps not as large a proportion as this book seems to suggest. It could be really fascinating - but not as written by an author I find to be both careless and egotistical. Of course YMMV. And I don't know whether there is any other lay-comprehensible writeup available.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, punditry, series: n/a, 2017
- Author (Geoffrey B. West): male, British, born in 1940, researcher, author not previously read
- English, public library, 479 pages, 2.5 stars
- read July 30-Aug 13, 2025, book not previously read

I'm not sure how this book ended up in my TBR list. Someone must have recommended it, but probably not on LibraryThing, since my notes on it include only a blurb from Goodreads.

84. Imager's Battalion by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the sixth book in the Imager Portfolio, the third of the second sub-series. In this book, our hero is serving as a military officer, with a small team of fellow imagers and a larger unit of conventional cavalry to support and protect them.

I'm once again at a loss for what to say about it, to avoid spoilers. One thing worth noting - the body count of the final battle - mostly among their opponents. It's pretty ugly, and this time it was done knowingly, using a side effect of major imaging discovered earlier in the series. It's probably true that the casualties would have been even worse in the long run, and less one-sided, without this action, as the war would have continued even longer. But I'm having a bit of trouble with the protagonist's ability to justify his personal body count, whatever his motives. (OTOH - this is a military adventure, and such stories are usually full of dead red shirts - non-characters whose deaths are merely a sign of the good guys' success - as well as justifiably slain evil opponents. So it's true to its genre.)

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2013
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41, #76, #78, #79 , #81 and #82 for 2025
- English, public library, 509 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 11-14, 2025; book previously read

85. The scientific revolution and the origins of modern science by John Henry

This is a lovely little book. It gives a history of the origin of science in a mere 162 pages, including endnotes and glossary. This was sufficient to teach me things I didn't already know, in spite of my ongoing interest in the topic.

It does a great job of carefully contextualizing the activities and statements of people we all know about, such as Francis Bacon, in terms of their time, place, and vocabulary. This is especially notable with discussion of "magic" - a term that absolutely did not mean what we think it does. (To a first approximation, if it couldn't be explained by Aristotle, it was "magic" - in particular, forces acting at a distance (gravity, electromagnetism), among other things; magic also had nothing of the supernatural about it - even demons had the same limitations as humans, except for knowing more.) In fact, the discussion of magic, and terms like "occult" - as used in the relevant period - was exceedingly interesting, given my interest in 20th century occultism.

Highly recommended, to those with interest in the topic.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history of science, series: n/a, 2008 (3rd edition - first was 1997)
- Author (John Henry): male, British, age unknown (currently emeritus), academic (history of science), author not previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 162 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 6-17, 2025, book not previously read

This book got onto my TBR list some time well before the covid epidemic, when I generally didn't record why a book was added. At a guess, I saw it some other book's bibliography, and decided that it looked interesting.

86. Antiagon Fire by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the seventh book in the Imager Portfolio, the fourth of the second sub-series. I'm in the process of re-reading the whole series, which I had read in 2019.

As always, I find it difficult to say much about the book without excessive spoilers. (Non-fiction reviews are so much easier to write.)

Each sub-series takes place at a different time in approximately the same area of a fantasy world. At the time of the second sub-series, the tech level is essentially Renaissance. Being a fantasy world, there is also some kind of magic/psionics. In this case, the main (and better known) talent is called Imaging. The talent is extremely rare, and somewhat dangerous to its possessors. There's also a talent I'll call foresight, involving prophetic visions. Both tend to run in the same families, but rarely occur in the same individuals.

Our hero is an unusually powerful imager. His wife has foresight, as well as being the youngest sister of their king. In this book, they get jointly appointed as envoys, as part of an ongoing attempt to unify the continent/large island where they live. After that they get involved in farther military action against the other remaining independent country.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2013
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41, #76, #78, #79 , #81, #82 and #84 for 2025
- English, public library, 460 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 15-18, 2025; book previously read

>103 ArlieS: Someone setting out to explain science in 162 pages garners my impressed respect, and slight pity...there must've been a goodly amount of unkind rhetoric slung at him for his hubris in 1997.

I'm even more impressed that his efforts passed muster with you, as you're not a reader to suffer laziness or sloppiness of thought tolerantly. I feel I should go get one out of sheer respect for his achievement!

Happy rest-of-weekend reading.

>105 richardderus: Not science. The history of the development of science out of older forms of knowledge.

87. Rex Regis by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the eighth book in the Imager Portfolio, the fifth and last of the second sub-series. I'm in the process of re-reading the whole series, which I had read in 2019/2020.

As always, I find it difficult to say much about the book without excessive spoilers. But I enjoyed it, and will be making a special trip to the library today, in spite of the heat, to check out the rest of the series. (I finished #9 last night.)

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2014
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41, #76, #78, #79 , #81, #82 #84, and #86 for 2025
- English, public library, 445 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 19-21, 2025; book previously read

88. Madness in Solidar by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the ninth book in the Imager Portfolio, the first of the third sub-series. I'm in the process of re-reading the whole series, which I had read in 2019/2020.

This sub-series takes place between the previous two - well after the founding of the Imagers' Collegium, but before the beginnings of the local Industrial Revolution. Solidar - founded in the second sub-series, by unifying several countries - is still ruled by a king. Things have been relatively peaceful for generations, except for piracy, and perhaps some issues with foreign powers - there's a bit of a naval arms race going on.

At the beginning of the book, we see the new head of the Imagers' Collegium, brought in from one of its provincial centers because the main branch lacked anyone qualified to replace the dying leader. The collegium has fallen on hard times, compared to its position in either of the other sub-series, with weaker imagers and a poor reputation. The country is also having issues, with intransigent conflict between the king and his High Holders, and impending issues with the Factors. The king (rex) is commonly referred to by epithets amounting to "the crazy king", though he's not in fact insane - just impulsive, stubborn, and unpopular.

Our viewpoint character/hero, somewhat over powered as always with this author, is the new head of the Imager's Collegium, attempting to sort out the unholy mess he's landed in.

To tell more would be spoiling, but like the rest of the series, it features a somewhat overpowered viewpoint character dealing with problems. As in most of the series, he has a team behind him, and has or develops allies not under his authority. There is violence, intrigue, and death.

I enjoyed it a lot.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2015
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of my #41, #76, #78, #79 , #81, #82 #84, #86 and #87 for 2025
- English, public library, 461 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 21-23, 2025; book previously read

89. Treachery's Tools by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the tenth book in the Imager Portfolio, the second of its third sub-series. It takes place thirteen years after the immediately previous book in the series, Madness in Solidar.

Alastar, married at the end of the first book, now has a pre-teen daughter, already an imager with high potential, unusually advanced for her age.

But she's not the focus of the story - the focus is yet more political trouble, in the form of a rebellion.

Once again, I don't want to say too much, because of spoilers, but I enjoyed the book.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2016
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 10 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 461 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 21-23, 2025; book previously read

90. Assassin's Price by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the eleventh book in the Imager Portfolio, which I've been rereading. It takes place six years after the immediately previous book in the series, and some of the same people are involved. There is, however, a new viewpoint character/hero, so it might be considered either as the third book of the third sub-series, or the first of a fourth sub-series.

This book is told from the point of view of a non-imager, a young man who is the eldest son of the current king (rex) of Solidar. He's rather recently decided to stop acting like a spoiled, entitled brat, and learn his future job. Unfortunately, his father is not cooperating most of the time, saying the prince has plenty of time to learn. But about one third of the way into the book the king is assassinated, and our viewpoint character inherits his job.

I enjoyed the book, even though I remembered enough from the first reading almost six years ago not to be surprised by the contents of the spoiler tag above, or other things revealed at the same time.

Sadly, there's only one more book left in this series. I'll have to do something else for fiction reading soon. Of course there are other series by the same author, but this was the one I was strongly in the mood for both now and when I started this reread.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2017
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 11 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 526 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 29-31, 2025; book previously read

I'd normally start a third thread at the start of September, but I don't have enough posts here for that to even be possible.

91. The WEIRDest people in the world : How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Patrick Henrich

This is a rather odd book, and I still can't decide the extent to which its conclusions can be trusted.

The basic thesis is that westerners are different from other humans, psychologically and culturally, partly due to literacy, and partly because they have a long history of not being allowed to marry their cousins. Moreover, this is good overall, since some of this is the cause of the Industrial Revolution and ongoing improvements in wealth and living standards throughout the world.

The only problem is that if I had a dime for every opinionated westerner who's "proved" the superiority of westerners, generally using specious logic, I'd be richer than Gates, Bezos, and Musk combined. And they generally have an explanation that's at least tangentially related to then-current science, whether phrenology, genetics, or - in this case - psychology. Moreover, sophisticated modern ones prefer terms like "different" to "superior", as in "human bio-diversity" - aka the latest euphemism for "scientific" racism - while still making their value judgment pretty much obvious.

But of course this doesn't mean that there are no (statistical) differences between groups of humans. And the Industrial Revolution - breaking the Malthusian Trap - did happen in a particular time and place, which of course cries out for some kind of explanation better than "Britons/Northern Europeans/Westerners/white people were somehow better than other humans, at least after a certain date".

The book basically cites three general differences between (some) westerners and (some) non-westerners.

The first involves literacy. Based on what's in this book, it seems to be well established that people who learn to read tend to use their brains a bit differently from illiterates. Some functions move to new brain locations, to make room for this extra functionality. Some of those functions tend to be done less well by literates than illiterates. AFAICT, no one is claiming that this has anything to do with genetics, let alone race; the brain is plastic, and wires itself based on how it is used. There's nothing dodgy about this research, and it's kind of amusing to be told that as a highly literate person, my brain is wired in a less common manner, at least compared to human history.

The second involves something called the Big Five personality traits. In this model, there are 5 basic dimensions of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion/Introversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These vary independently; you can imagine plotting a person's psychological location in 5-dimensional space.

This model replicates nicely, when you do your research on, e.g. American undergraduates. Since that was the majority of research being done, this was postulated as a general theory of human personality. Then some enterprising anthropologists decided to try similar testing with whatever group of foragers, or subsistence farmers or other non-westerners they happened to be studying - and the model generally proved inapplicable. Oops!

Third, we have a confusing pattern where different cultures have very different norms about how strangers and kinfolk should be treated. The authors discuss research techniques used to quantify the differences, in the course of which they give a picture of what those differences are, that I simply can't explain in a sentence or two. But as a sound bite summary, consider a society where nepotism is virtuous, as well as being simple common sense. Business of all kinds tends to involve pre-existing relationships, generally kinship. all one's relatives are jointly responsible for their behaviour - if you injure me, it makes perfect sense for my brother to injure your cousin in return. etc. etc.

The authors have a complex explanation for this pattern, and its relative absence among westerners, with some supporting research, but I found it barely suggestive. Their theory is that the Catholic Church long ago decided to forbid increasingly distant relatives to marry each other. This basically broke up European clans, or at least greatly reduced them, so that Europeans wound up replacing clans with voluntary societies, and even individual relationships. This happened to varying degrees depending on how long an area was Catholic, and even the locations of early bishoprics.

This led somehow to concepts like rule of law, reduced nepotism etc.

It also resulted in individuals showing a more consistent face to everyone they knew, rather than behaving extremely differently with people based on kinship roles and relationships.

So it's the root cause of all the differences between Westerners and Others, except that bit about literacy. Or so the author alleges.

Somehow, differing levels of this within Europe don't matter. And anyone outside Europe and the settler colonies who acts like this is obviously imitating Europeans/somewhat western acculturated.

The authors claim this clan destroying thing is unique in human history. (Yet the book even mentions the Chinese communists successfully disempowering the Chinese clans...)

There are also a few of the usual errors committed by people whose knowledge of history comes from grade school. In particular, what appeared to be complete cluelessness about literacy rates in the Roman Empire.

Bottom line: I think too much got put together into a single pattern, possibly because the author has a gut level certainty that westerners are different - and that somehow that difference is Westerners vs every other human that ever existed. Moreover, the Western differences are the source of world prosperity, not to mention breaking out of the Malthusian trap. Even though there's no reason to believe those differences were new at the time this prosperity began.

Still, some of the detailed information is fascinating, and a bit of an antidote to "of course everyone thinks like me".

p.s. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2020
- Author (Joseph Patrick Henrich): male, American, born in 1968, academic (evolutionary biology), author previously read (2016)
- English, public library, 680 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Aug 4-Sep 1, 2025, book not previously read

I imagine this book got onto my TBR because of some kind of LibraryThing recommendation. I don't know which system it came from.

92. Endgames by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 12th and last book of the Imager Portfolio. I'm already missing having one of them to read when I want something enjoyable and entirely unstressful, without even the trivial stress of wondering if something terrible will happen to a character I like.

I've started a book by another author, found among fiction I'd bought but never read, and it's almost hitting the same spot, but not quite as well. Worse, there's only one of it, not a dozen, and many of the other books on those shelves should have been discarded after being effectively DNF'd.

Getting back to this book, it takes place immediately after the last volume. The viewpoint character is the king of his country, facing lots of political issues, often violent, and yet another plot to assassinate and replace him. He's also looking for a wife, or more correctly courting a particular lady.

He has great ambitions, but all we see is him dealing with the latest crises. But that makes it possible to address those ambitions. Instead of writing yet another volume, showing him working on those, we learn the results from an epilogue; perhaps he's become powerful enough and successful enough that the author judged that any subsequent volume would be boring.

Once again I enjoyed the book, and wish I could say a lot more without excessive spoilers.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2019
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 12 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 573 pages, 4 stars
- read Aug 31-Sep 4, 2025; book previously read

Pearl Rule 5. Nemesis by Bill Napier

Some year(s) ago, I got a craving for catastrophe fiction, end of the world novels, etc., and composed a list of possibilities. Some were easily available, some much more difficult. I acquired most of the easily available ones, generally from a local library, and either read or DNF'd them. The others stayed in my overgrown TBR list. This novel was one of them, and I eventually acquired it by inter-library loan.

As it turned out, this book totally failed to hit the spot. It was readable enough, but seemed to mostly be about noxious interpersonal interactions, often involving unlikable characters. Worse, the predicted catastrophe turned out to be a fake, concocted as an excuse for pursuing rather noxious international policies, such as preemptive nuclear strikes. The book is basically a thriller, except with plenty of as-far-as-I-know accurate hard science. (The author is a professional astronomer, though better known as a writer.) Add to this some gender dynamics that were getting a little dated even in 1998 when the book was published.

In another mood, I might have read it as an enjoyable thriller, with a bonus of more or less accurate astronomy in more detail than I'd expect from such a novel. It would have wound up rated 3, and then forgotten. But in my current mood, I'm abandoning it after 133 of 659 pages (the book isn't as long as that implies; the only copy I could find was in large print).

I've been a bit dissatisfied by the quality and quantity of the book recommendations I've been getting, so I did some web searches, finding one page that listed several alternatives, as well as a bunch that were essentially useless. I checked out most of the choices listed on that web page I cited, and found that Story Graph seemed likely to produce a different set of recommendations from those I had been getting, and was furthermore having about a 10% hit rate recommending books I'd already read, and mostly appreciated. (This is similar to LibraryThing's rate when I first discovered it, back when classic was the only recommendation system.)

StoryGraph is somewhat of a work-in-progress, with various annoying warts, but it's designed for someone who wants recommendations suited to their current cravings, not just their historical reading habits, and furthermore allows selection on some attributes that LibraryThing doesn't even record. Perhaps you'd prefer fantasy with strong world-building, or romance novels without graphic sex scenes. Maybe today you feel like reading fiction that's lighthearted or funny. Perhaps you have a personal trigger about e.g. car accidents or chronic illness, and never want to see anything with content of that type. There are lot of choices like that available to fine tune your recommendations.

It's not perfect. Some of the things I really want to avoid aren't being flagged. In one case, a major turnoff for me is offered in the list of characteristics you can select as positive, but not as negative. And while the site has some reviews, there's more depth and variety on LibraryThing, to the point that after getting a list from StoryGraph, I immediately check out the likely ones on LibraryThing, even before checking whether my local libraries have any of them.

There's also the all too common modern issue of an apparent absence of documentation, so I had to figure out by trial and error that if I wanted to stop seeing a book recommended, I had to either say that I'd read it (not just that I owned it), or that I'd DNF'd it. (There's no option to just say "never recommend this again".)

Still, it's another source. I've made a pick list of fiction recommended by StoryGraph and available at my local library, and will pick up several books on my next visit; that should help me truly calibrate their recommendations.

I've been thinking about why I like L. E. Modesitt Jr. and his Imager series in particular.

It features cultures and situations where many things remain unsaid, even dangerous to say. People often "teach" by telling their students to figure things out on their own. The protagonists often resent this, and express frustration in the privacy of their thoughts. But they succeed in figuring things out well enough to be not just successful, but outstanding. Often the process of figuring it out for themselves leads them to come up with out-of-the-box approaches that work better than what their teachers and elders are doing.

This is, of course, the story of any successful person on the autistic spectrum. No one explains the "obvious" of interacting with non-autists in ways acceptable to the non-autists; instead, they punish the autist for willfully doing the wrong thing. (Many, perhaps most non-autists "know" everyone thinks like they do. Being hegemonic, they can afford to be rather weak on theory-of-mind, though some project that deficit onto autists while insisting on their own perfection.)

It's nice to see people like me succeeding, in spite of non-assistance and sometimes active sabotage from those who start out with power over them. It's especially nice at a time when my own capabilities are declining with age. This is true even in a fantasy novel, with an obviously somewhat over powered protagonist.

More than that, it's relaxing and comforting. Reading these books strokes my subconscious gently, reassuring it that the non-communicative and/or lying bastards can be handled. It's an effective emotional counter to reading the news. Other novels can be equally captivating, but they don't have that secondary effect. And that's why I have borrowed another bunch of Modesitt novels from the library to reread, as well as pulling one off my shelf.

I wonder if Modesitt himself is on the autistic spectrum, or perhaps otherwise neuro-divergent.

>116 ArlieS: Reading these books strokes my subconscious gently, reassuring it that the non-communicative and/or lying bastards can be handled. It's an effective emotional counter to reading the news. Other novels can be equally captivating, but they don't have that secondary effect.

Succinct and relatable, Arlie.

93. The White Order by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This fantasy novel by L. E. Modesitt Jr. is from his sprawling, gigantic Saga of Recluce. It's number 8 in publication order, and (currently) #14 in chronological order. It's the first of two in a sub-series, which overlaps with events told from the opposite side in an earlier published member of the series.

I picked it to reread when I ran out of novels in his Imager Portfolio, partly because I'd originally rated it at 5 and purchased my own copy, so I didn't need to visit the library. I've since made a library visit, and acquired its sequel, as well as books from several other Recluce sub-series.

This story begins with a youngster being discouraged by his guardians from exploring his mage talents. He turns out to be an orphan, with his parents killed by the magical powers-that-be. His guardians fear the same will happen to him.

It's a bildungsroman, following the youngster until young adulthood, and the early stages of his first serious courtship.

His situation requires keeping a lot of secrets and a lot of reading between the lines (see post 116 in this thread).

As one expects from a Modesitt story, he handles his problems successfully, but another volume will be required to completely resolve them. In fact, he goes from orphan living with relatives, to mill boy/miller's apprentice (by the actions of his guardians), then to scrivener's apprentice (by the actions of the miller, who fears trouble from the mage establishment), to apprentice mage (by the actions of that same mage establishment), to junior full mage in the course of this book. He does his best throughout, with extras not part of his official role or training, but except perhaps for learning to read and write (while a mill boy) and later actions as a senior mage student, he's more acted upon than acting - decisions are not his own. But his hard work and careful reticence keeps him alive and allows him to profit from circumstances outside his control.

I enjoyed this reread, and am now rereading the sequel, which I borrowed from a local library.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 1998
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 13 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, own shelves, 444 pages, 4 stars
- read Sep 6-9, 2025; book previously read

>117 richardderus: Hiya Richard. Thanks for dropping by.

It's a good morning.

As I was blearily reading LibraryThing in part because I couldn't face checking the news, I got an email from the library that I have hold(s) ready for pickup. Perhaps even better, it turned out to be an interlibrary loan.

94. The signal and the noise: Why so many predictions fail - but some don't by Nate Silver

This was an accidental reread. It had gotten on my TBR list in 2013, when it was relatively new; I noted it as recommended by a specific individual I knew as a "great book on prob & stat". Apparently it was also recommended by someone else, acquired, read, and recorded - before I started routinely recording my reading dates.

At the time I first read it, I rated it at 4. This time, it felt kind of also ran - I already knew most of what it contained, but didn't remember the book at all. (I only discovered it was a reread a few minutes ago, when I started the process of recoding what I thought was a "new" read.)

This is an introduction to the unreliability of many/most predictions, with reasons why they fail, and some examples of efforts that consistently do better than random chance. It also introduces the Bayesian approach to probability, which can be a useful discipline, and a corrective to common errors.

Other people have covered all of this, except perhaps specifics of the author's personal efforts at poker and at sports predictions. The author is however readable - if (for me) none too memorable. Today I'm rating it at 3, not my original 4.

The wikipedia page for the Bayesian approach is so heavily mathematical that many eyes will simply glaze over. The book does better, with a worked out example, showing counter-intuitive results. Here's my capsule summary, with only simple arithmetic.

The essence of the Bayesian approach to prediction is to start with a numeric estimate of the odds of whatever you are interested in evaluating, before looking at new evidence, then using simple arithmetic to create a new estimate incorporating the new evidence. This is very useful in situations where, e.g. false positives are possible, and the thing you want to predict is exceedingly rare.

Let's say there's a one in a million chance of a person like you currently having disease X. (It's a rare disease.) You take a screening test, known to have a quite low rate of false positives - of 2000 people who don't have the disease, one will get a positive report. To make things simple, let's say that anyone who has the disease will also get a positive result. You get a positive result. What is the chance that you have the disease?

If a million people without the disease are tested, 1/2000 of them will get a positive result. That's 500 false positives. If a million random people are tested, 1 will actually have the disease, and also get a positive result. So we get one true positive, and 500 false positives(*). So after your positive result, you have approximately one chance in 500 of having disease X. That's not bad at all, even though it's worse than the one in a million chance you started with.

(*) Yes, I did some rounding here. If a million random people are tested, only 999,999 don't have the disease on average. I didn't want to deal with 999,999/2000 false positives, and quietly rounded that up to 500.

This approach is incredibly useful, if only to avoid scaring yourself silly when the doctors suggest a more accurate (and perhaps more expensive) follow up test - it will probably be negative.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, prediction, series: n/a, 2012
- Author (Nate Silver): male, American, born in 1978, "statistician, political analyst, author, sports gambler, and poker player", author previously read (this book)
- English, public library, 534 pages, 3 stars
- read Aug 5-Sep 13, 2025, book previously read

I just collected 3 more inter-library loans. and I even walked to the library in spite of the heat. I rock!

>122 ArlieS: ...and shower, one hopes...

The word "Bayesian" causes visceral pain to me, having been in that trench before, and feeling as though it was deeper than the Challenger Deep.

>123 richardderus: What bugs me about Bayesian probability is that some of the people who promote it most enthusiastically have various cult stigmata. These would be the so called "Rationalists". I encountered a blog in this space that was relatively sane, based on what I now know about some (a few? more?) of their fellow travelers. I learned the argot and generally acted like a member in good standing. Meanwhile close friends called it "that cult".

Fortunately (?) the blog closed down, and was replaced with several other forums, none of them as satisfying. (It had been doing a decent job of promoting communication across the US political abyss; the replacements positioned themselves on one or other side.) None satisfied me, and I'm left with only one ongoing distant relationship, with a local blogger who turned out to also be known to my (non-local) sister.

>124 ArlieS: Theories of everything are alarming to me. When they say they're "rational" it becomes terrifying..."eugenics" was once a rational theory. So were others now debunked if not dispensed with. The spurious air of objectivity is a figleaf I always want to lift. I seldom find anything salubrious under it.

>125 richardderus: "Rational" is an interesting word.

Among its many "meanings" I recall the assertion that "rational thought" was something doable by human males, but not human females. (This was presented to me by a male human as unquestionable truth.) Damned if I know what that would be, since various thought processes commonly referred to as "thinking with one's dick" or similar are sometimes indulged in by humans of all genders, whether or not they are more common among males (by whatever definition may apply).

The "rationalists" at one time presented themselves humbly as an online group/forum attempting to explore ways of being "less wrong" than they otherwise would be. This was quite seductive, unless/until one applied a cult checklist to their collective behaviour. Frankly, I think they started as fallible humans actually attempting their stated goal - but developed many of the usual human flaws.

I believe that objectivity is a useful goal - it just isn't entirely achievable. And of course, like all ideals, it's often misused for extremely base purposes. And if I had a dollar for time anyone abused that concept as part of their habitual bullying, I'd be richer than Elon Musk ;-(

I'm less sure about rationality, in part because I don't know what it actually means. (Too often, it means "agrees with me" or "agrees with social consensus".) But also because it's not healthy to ignore one's own emotions, and generally not kind or sensible to ignore the emotions of others. And that is, too often, among the connotations of "rationality".

OTOH, I'm almost certainly on the autistic spectrum. I use logic and evidence based reasoning for social matters that non-autists handle unconsciously. This can often result in me doing a better job, because I'm better able to handle people not sharing my cultural background, while others simply "know" that e.g. a foreigner's "good manners" indicate that they are "untrustworthy".

95. Colors of Chaos by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This fantasy novel is the immediate sequel to The White Order. They are the 8th and 9th books published in the Saga of Recluce.

The main character (hero) is an idealist, seeking to improve his world, or at least as much as he can reach. As an up and coming member of the elite in an extremely powerful city-state, that could be quite a large area - if, of course, he can survive.

His city-state (Fairhaven) is different from most you'd encounter in a medieval-esque fantasy novel. The city is cleaner, with less crime and fewer beggars than anywhere else he knows of. But they do this by vicious unforgiving enforcement of rigid rules. Just about any crime will end you up working on a road crew for the rest of your life - if you aren't simply killed. They take a similar approach to other countries in their area of influence - which is half a continent. Fairhaven has built and maintains roads across the continent, and insist that this be paid for by everyone, not just their own people, and not just those who use the roads - this requires a permit, and using them without a permit is another way to get killed or sent to a road crew. All this, and magic too. Indeed, Fairhaven is run by its mage guild, and the leader of the guild is also ruler of the city.

In previous volumes of the series, we've seen Fairhaven from the outside, as an oppressive, aggressive power with arrogant leaders. Now we see it from the inside.

Our hero believes in Fairhaven, and its overall mission, even while having issues with some of the details. He doesn't like enforcing the unforgiving laws, but believes the results are worth it. His main issues are with infighting, and with bad policy choices.

So that's the setup. Any more detail would be spoiling.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 1999
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 14 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 634 pages, 4 stars
- read Sep 10-17, 2025; book previously read

>126 ArlieS: I think the best definition of "rational" is "syn. delusional" but I'm an embittered cynical old man.

>128 richardderus: Is it possible that the best definition for "human" might be "syn. delusional"?

>129 ArlieS: I'd say probability on that is indistinguishable from 1.

96. Iron kingdom : the rise and downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 by Christopher M. Clark

This is a 776 page tome on the history of Prussia, complete with 93 pages of end notes. I had a lot to learn in this area, knowing a bit about German history but nothing much specifically Prussian, except vague common knowledge about Otto von Bismarck.

The book was informative, and sparked in me a strong distaste for many of the early rulers of Brandenburg, who were to eventually take over Prussia.

But it was also hard to follow, particularly in the beginning. There were too damn many people, mostly named Frederick, who didn't make much individual impression on me, even though their political behaviour/policies sometimes changed significantly from one to the next.

I'm rating the book at 3, rather than my usual 3.5 for a book that gives me lots of new information, but isn't otherwise notable - the confusion effect was just that bad. It did get easier as the centuries progressed, but that may have been because I've recently read one book about Hitler's Germany, and am concurrently reading another.

For my next dive into German/Prussian history, once I get through the third Reich, I'll probably look for a biography of Bismarck, unless of course recording reading this book triggers some interestingly relevant recommendation. But with 15 library books either started or in my to read pile, along with two owned books in my to read soon pile, and a hold waiting for me at the library, I won't be looking for additional books right away.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2006
- Author (Christopher M. Clark): male, Australian (lives in UK), born in 1960, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, public library, 776 pages, 3 stars
- read July 25-Sep 18, 2025, book not previously read

>130 richardderus: ;-)

97. The ship who won by Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye

This science fiction novel was one of many sitting on my to-be-read shelves when I ran out of unread fiction from the library. So I picked it up.

This series involves partnerships between a normal human "brawn" and a cyborg human "brain" who's usually controlling/inhabiting a spaceship. Some of the books in the series are quite good.

Unfortunately, this episode didn't work well for me. It starts interestingly enough. But overall it feels like it's written to be part of a low quality series - perhaps one TV episode among many, featuring the same characters and not much progression or even continuity between episodes. (There is, in fact, one direct sequel featuring the same characters, not some huge series.)

I don't like the brawn, and feel that his brain enables his bad behaviour. The brawn seems short on ethics and/or common sense. While he appears to be dedicated to his brain partner, he otherwise appears to be basically a user, and his partner supports him in this. He's in favor of fairness to underclass individuals, in general - but no need to be revolutionary and give them complete equality. He treats individuals more as tools than people. He has a happy affair with an upper class local woman, who clearly wants to marry him - then leaves the planet without her, with this facilitated by a lie by his partner about the dangers of space travel. I'm not impressed.

That said, the story was readable enough as a tale of a space explorer team finding a planet with sentients living there - something rather unusual in this universe. There are problems, which are eventually solved. (No spoiler there, really, given the title.) And then it's back to resupply and presumably on to another unexplored planet.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 1994
- Author 1 (Anne McCaffrey): female, American, born 1926, writer, author previously read
- Author 2 (Jody Lynn Nye): female, American, born 1957, writer, author previously read
- English, own shelves, 330 pages, 3 stars
- read Sep 4-18, 2025; book not previously read

>133 ArlieS: Never liked those after the "only known T2" to Helva's T1 was "an avowed homosexual." What vows are these, and why were none ever administered to me? I feel very left out.

98. The Mongrel Mage by L. E. Modesitt Jr

This is the 19th book in Modesitt's Saga of Recluce fantasy series. It's the first in a sub-series of 4 novels, that tells the story of the founding of what was to become the city-state of Fairhaven, which we see in my 94th and 95th book of this year.

This is a classic example of Modesitt's long history, where things done with good intentions work well for a while, starting from the end of one sub-series - then are seen again much later after their unintended consequences have themselves become problems for the heroes to deal with.

It's written much later than most of the other Modesitt books I've reread this year, and it surprised me, on my first reading, by having 2 important gay male characters - a pair of mages living together in a committed relationship. I think these may be Modesitt's first obviously gay characters, at least in this series. (By the looks of it, he doesn't care either way about LGBTQ issues, though in this novel he uses the pair as part of a theme involving overly rigid societies making people unwelcome, partly due to rigidity and partly due to normal human nastiness - someone wants what someone else has, so uses whatever prejudice is handy in their attempts to get it - often opposed by other people.)

This novel starts with a young man who is a not-very-good chaos wizard, living with his uncle - a much more powerful and skillful chaos wizard. The local chief wizard, enabled by the local ruler, wants all mages under his thumb. The uncle is killed; the nephew flees to a different polity, ruled by a trader's council. The young men learns that his talents make him more of an order wizard. He spends time learning to use those talents, while working on making a living. Then his former ruler invades, and he winds up drafted to help combat this.

He's kind of overpowered - being a Modesitt hero - and does well at this. His side wins. But there's another local mage with ambitions to rule all the others, with a side kick that has unrequited lust for our hero's girlfriend, whom he wishes to force into marriage. This involves sabotage of various kinds, including trying to get the hero killed in battle, as well as destroying his new livelihood. It also involves portraying the hero to other mages as a kind of mongrel, neither a chaos nor an order mage.

We end the book with nothing much resolved, except for the war, and our sympathies entirely with the hero, his girlfriend, his business partner, and his other friends.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2017
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 15 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 559 pages, 4 stars
- read Sep 18-22, 2025; book previously read

99. Outcasts of Order by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 20th book in Modesitt's Saga of Recluce fantasy series, and the second of four in a sub-series about a mage named Beltur.

In this book, Beltur flees Elparta, along with his wife-to-be and his smithing partner, after jealousy, greed and politics has made his situation there untenable. They go to Axalt, where the smith has kin, and try to settle down there as more-or-less ordinary people, earning money by their smith work. Trouble follows them.

A seven year old girl with chaos mage talents is exiled from Elparta in the middle of winter, and arrives in Axalt with her parents. (The ambitious in Elparta have concocted a moral panic about chaos and chaos mages.) The family moves in with Beltur and his wife, overcrowding the house they are renting. But Axalt also dislikes chaos magic and chaos mages. It also has politics, and a greedy group of especially rich traders.

When the dust clears, Beltur's situation is worsening, and expected to eventually turn into an ongoing conflict. So both families decide to leave again, heading for the distant ducky of Montgren, known primarily for its sheep; a trader they'd travelled with to Axalt had invited Beltur and his wife to come there if things didn't work out for them in Axalt.

In Montgren, the duchess offers them the task of straightening out a down-at-heels town plagued by abusive traders and their bravos, and eyed hungrily by three of the neighboring polities. The lure is that the four adults will become the majority on the town council, and will get to run things the way they consider fair, within the laws of Montgren. They accept, hoping to create a place where they - and others, particularly other mages - will be free to live and work without political interference, particularly by the rich.

The book is once again a combination of adventure story, exploration of daily life in a fantasy world, and serious look at human nature and its warts. I came for the adventure story, and the fantasy of someone I can identify with being able to live their best life in spite of political and plutocratic elites. I stayed for that, but also for the clear understanding that perfection is impossible, all solutions involve tradeoffs, and even the best intentions eventually produce problematic results.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2018
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 16 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 654 pages, 4 stars
- read Sep 22-25, 2025; book previously read

>136 ArlieS: TWENTY. FIVE. BOOKS. in the series.
...
...
...my gob is smacked! That is astonishing longevity for a series. Less really for the writer, I totally understand how he could and would write even more than that...but on the buying public and the publisher's part. I wonder if it could even happen now.

Enjoy your week-ahead's reads Arlie.

>137 richardderus: Very impressive indeed - you see a fair number of mystery series go that long, but not so much in the fantasy genre.

>138 ChrisG1: Apart from Perry Rhodan (German SFF), I can't come up with a single one, but I'm hardly the SME on fantasy.

>137 richardderus: >138 ChrisG1: C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series (science fiction) has 22 volumes, plus 2 short stories/prequels.

Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern has 27, including 3 written or finished by her son Todd McCaffrey after her death. (Maybe more - there are 3 of his on LT's series page, and 9 that look like Dragonriders books on Todd's page on LT.)

>137 richardderus: Modesitt does a lot of things right, that other authors get wrong. In particular, when a lead character gets too powerful, Modesitt refrains from writing a sequel that escalates the opposition and/or the body count beyond plausibility or comfort, so as to write yet another volume. Instead, he moves somewhere else in the same world - often also centuries earlier or later. The new hero/viewpoint character starts much less powerful or competent than the previous one has become - generally in fact he starts about where the previous one had started in his first book.

So the overall series gets longer, but each 2-4 book sub-series stays reasonable.

The alternative approach is shown by David Weber, among other authors, along with a multitude of inexperienced gamesmasters running overly generous RPG campaigns. Their heroes/player characters wind up insanely over powered, facing opposition to match.

David Weber is now trying to tell other characters' stories in their own books, as well as branching out into earlier times. But his publishers tend to sell each of these as its own series, rather than as sub-series of an overall series set in the same universe.

>140 ArlieS: ...that's three, of *hundreds* published....

>141 ArlieS: Would you consider Weber's Safehold series fantasy? To me it feels very secondary-world fantasy. I enjoyed six or so of those chonky Bois but lost steam after that.

>142 richardderus: I'd class Safehold as science fiction, even though an awful lot of it involves lower-than-modern tech in a made up world. There is some future tech, as well as the plausible(?) future back story. OTOH, it doesn't scratch the normal science fiction reader's itches and is very much not "hard" science fiction.

We really need a new name, for that fuzzy category between fantasy and science fiction, where the unexplainium is hand waved as science/future rather than magic/another world, but the culture has more in common with Tolkien than with any imagined future. But the genre people call it "science fiction," so I'll do the same.

>143 ArlieS: That issue is the main reason I like the label "speculative fiction," which makes both sides of that divide really, really defensive. Bonus!

100. A culture of growth : the origins of the modern economy by Joel Mokyr

This book is what happens when an economist attempts to explain history, in particular the Industrial Revolution (writ large), while writing in what's not his first language.

I'll start with the problems, which probably isn't fair ;-) The Gunning Fog Index, or perhaps some other measure of writing complexity, is high enough to give me difficulties, and force me to reread sentences and paragraphs. This is not helped by second language/poor editing problems, such that some of those problematic sentences turned out not to be parsable as correct English. Add to this the use of unfamiliar (to me) economics-flavored terminology like "cultural entrepreneur", along with relatively small print, and you can see why it took me 28 days to read a mere 403 pages.

Once you get past the writing issues, what you get is a narrative history style explanation of how the author believes the Industrial Revolution came to be, with special emphasis on why it didn't happen earlier and in China, or at some other place and time. I call it narrative history style because it's got more story than statistics. This would not be out of place in e.g. a text book, but OTOH, if I were in a bad mood I'd refer to the style as "just so stories".

There's a fair bit of erudition on display in the footnotes and references - it's definitely a normal academic book in that way, as well as in its language. I have no complaints there. I also don't mistrust the author - what he's writing is reasonable, and consistent with my existing knowledge.

Unfortunately, though, I'd heard it all before, some of it fairly recently. That, plus the writing, leads to my somewhat low rating. Another person's mileage might vary.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, (economic) history, series: n/a, 2017
- Author (Joel Mokyr): male, Dutch-born Israeli-American, born in 1946, academic (economics and history), author not previously read
- English, public library, 403 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Aug 31-Sep 28, 2025, book not previously read

>144 richardderus: Some also use the term "science fantasy."

>144 richardderus: >146 ChrisG1: Good terms. Thank you both.

>145 ArlieS: Interesting that the book started its life as a Schumpeter lecture.That's some interesting territory to cover, and in a French guy lecturing to a German audience! I'd've hated to be the one translating this....

>146 ChrisG1: I've used that one for anything with FTL tropes, since that's really fantasyland.

101. The Mage-Fire War by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 21st book in Modesitt's Saga of Recluce fantasy series, and the third of three (or four) in a sub-series about a mage named Beltur.

(Beltur is the viewpoint character in the first three books where he appears, but not in the fourth - a similar situation to Madness in Solidar, Treachery's Tools and Assassin's Price, where the third book of that sub-series changes viewpoint characters, with the original one still present and acting somewhat as a mentor to the new one.) But that switch happens in the 22nd book of the Recluce series, which I'm currently reading - not in the one I'm writing about now.

The Mage-Fire War covers starts after Beltur's team agrees to take over Haven (in the last book), and continues until the resolution of the first major crisis, foreshadowed by the title. (So I don't think it's spoiling to mention a war.)

It's Modesitt's usual mix of day to day details, constructive actions, worries, plans, and eventual conflict. In classic Modesitt fashion, there's a single viewpoint character, described in the third person. We see other people through his interactions with them. (I like this so much better than the more common modern style where there are enough viewpoint characters to need a scorecard, and narration is broken up into tiny pieces each with a different viewpoint and often a different location.)

We see Beltur trying to be a good ruler/leader, but at the same time clear that there needs to be a place for him and his team, where they can make the decisions and so won't be run out of town by the local elite - or, for that matter, by aggressive neighbours from adjacent lands. He's surprisingly autocratic, though consultative - think of him as a benevolent despot, sometimes plagued by self-doubt. And some of his actions look to me a lot like bullying - always justified, but I'd certainly find myself angry and extremely mistrustful, if his team came in and took over my town, however run-down and plagued by brigands it might be.

This conflict stays implicit - I simply notice I'd prefer to be him or read about him than live with him, and doubly so if he were appointed as my ruler, rather than e.g. merely being family or neighbour. Except, that is, for his occassional self-doubts, mostly about outright casualties.

In a fantasy novel, a mighty hero who makes decisions for others is, miraculously, always right, and those close to them recognize that - only the adversaries disagree and they are mostly motivated by selfishness. Things don't work that way in ordinary reality, though they may work that way in e.g. elementary school history books. So this works just fine for me as a fantasy novel. I worry, though, about a plethora of people who plainly aren't always right, but think this is how the world is and should work, with themselves cast as Mighty hero (TM).

Overall, a pleasant read, and comforting in a world where I too don't feel safe from the jealousy and greed of Leaders (TM), and see little recourse except for having magical powers, and so being able to take over my own local area with the goal of making myself safe from Leaders(TM) by ruling justly, taking down the evil Leaders and their minions, and all the rest of the heroic fantasy trope.



Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2019
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 17 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 544 pages, 4 stars
- read Sep 26-30, 2025; book previously read

102. The Third Reich in power by Richard J. Evans

This is the second volume of a so far excellent series of non-fiction doorstoppers about the Third Reich.

It took me a bit more than 2 months to read it, but that was mostly because it's huge, and somewhat because the comparisons I make with current events are more than a little stressful. (Blessedly the book itself is too old to be grinding that particular axe.)

I learned a lot about a part of relatively recent(*) history that I really only knew at the level any decently educated person of my generation knew, never having examined it in depth. I.e. everyone knew about it, and it was probably in the K12 curriculum, but without much nuance or detail.

The book has the scholarly apparatus you'd expect - plenty of end notes, and a large bibliography. There's none of this modern habit of leaving such things out as irrelevant to the target reader.

Overall a great and informative read, perhaps a hair less good than the prior volume (which I rated at 4.5), but well worth reading.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2005
- Author (Richard J. Evans): male, Great Britain, born in 1947, academic (history), author of my #53 for 2025
- English, public library, 941 pages, 4 stars
- read July 22-Oct 2, 2025, book not previously read

This series was a book bullet from drneutron. I don't recall now whether he just recommended the first of the series, but I liked that one enough that the other 2 would be on my TBR for that alone, without any other recommendation.

(*) relatively recent, in this case, is "within my father's lifetime", but he was about 11 at the start of the period covered by this book. My mother was born during this period.

I read all of the, and thought the whole set was really good! Glad you kept going.

>152 drneutron: Looks like Ill be getting to the library today, mostly to return some books that are due soon, so I'll pick up The Third Reich at War while I'm there.

103. Fairhaven Rising by L. E. Modesitt Jr

This is the 22nd book in Modesitt's Saga of Recluce fantasy series, and takes place sixteen years after The Mage-Fire War, with a new viewpoint character/hero. This hero is a woman - the first time I recall Modesitt using a female viewpoint character. She was 7 years old in the previous book, and a very young pre-apprentice chaos mage.

From where I sit, there's very little about her that's specifically female, except getting cranky/sore when she has her period, taking magical precautions against pregnancy (in case of rape - she's not sexually active), and experiencing a bit more contemptuous behaviour than would an otherwise similar man.

In fact, Taelya is very much like her (courtesy) uncle Beltur, hero of the previous 3 books. She's powerful enough to scare people, takes charge automatically in combat situations, and does what she believes to be required, whether or not others - including her superiors - agree.

Fairhaven continues to be a great place for mages, drawing refugees from elsewhere. It also accepts both chaos and order mages, unlike most other polities, and is rather less sexist than most in that universe. (Most parts of the world are pro-male sexist; a very few are pro-female sexist.) Both women and men serve in the Fairhaven council, and both mages and non-mages.

Taelya is just as overpowered as any other Modesitt hero/viewpoint character, but still improving, and worried she won't be strong enough and skilled enough to handle the challenges she faces. (So was Beltur, among many other of Modesitt's heroes.)

The book has the usual mix of day-to-day life and adventure, complete with mostly successful violence. It's a tried and true formula for Modesitt, and I love it.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2021
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 18 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 544 pages, 4 stars
- read Sep 26-30, 2025; book previously read

>154 ArlieS: Modesitt does have a couple of other women as main characters, Spellsong Cycle and The Lord Protector's Daughter in Corean Chronicles are the ones I recall.

>155 quondame: You're right. I've read the first 3 of the Spellsong Cycle, and the Lord Protector's Daughter, but had forgotten entirely about that.

104. Friends indeed by David Weber and Jane M. Lindskold

This is the 5th volume of a sub-series set in the Honor Harrington Universe. The series is set in the early days of Manticore, and focusses on one of Honor's ancestors. It's intended for "young adults", aka teens, and by the 5th volume the protagonist is just barely adult.

The series focusses on the discovery of the treecats, and treecats and humans learning more about each other, with a certain amount of conflict with evil humans wrongdoers. Earlier volumes also have conflict between youngsters over age appropriate matters.

I'm generally a sucker for anything in the Honorverse, but this particular volume had problems worth noting.

First of all, it lacks a defined story arc. It's a slice of the protagonist's experience, with foreshadowing early in this book of events that don't actually happen, presumably delayed to a later volume. In fact there's ongoing foreshadowing, in the form of views into the activities of selfish, ant-treecat adults with political power, for presumably dire plots that don't otherwise become visible in this volume. I feel like the publisher said "500 pages is enough", and the authors stopped in mid flow, added an exciting crisis to provide a kind of ending, and left a bazillion loose ends up in the air.

Second, it has a common modern bad habit of making the first third of the book tedious by jumping from character to character, never completing an event without one or more interruptions, and farther more requiring a score card (not included) to identify the many characters and in particular the relationships among them. In this case, you also need familiarity with one of the recent sub-series for adults, to make any kind of sense out of the prologue - which is also a case of foreshadowing conflicts that don't occur in the current volume. Even with my familiarity with the series, I found that first third heavy going.

Don't start your explorations of the Honorverse with this book. Read it if and when you become a completionist about the universe. But if you do become such a completionist, it's decent enough that I rated it more than 3 (aka "finished it; not memorable").

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, juvenile, series (not first), 2025
- Author 1: male, American, born in 1952, novelist, author, author frequently read in past years
- Author 2: female, American, born in 1962, novelist, author previously read
- English, public library, 561 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Sep 25-Oct 10, 2025; book not previously read

105. World fire : the culture of fire on earth by Stephen J. Pyne

This book covers parts of the history of the human relationship with fire, particularly both wildfire and fires set to shape the environment, facilitating human goals. It's a bit too poetic for my taste, with lots of metaphor, including in its organization, which (therefore?) appears to me as not entirely well organized.

We first get chapters on the fire history of various parts of the world - though not a complete survey. Then we get a lot of discussion about fire management and its unexpected and mostly bad side effects, starting more or less with the age of European colonization of non-European areas. Finally we get a lot of material about relatively recent events and issues in the United States in particular.

The best part for me was the fire history, where I was learning things I didn't know, from an author who didn't presume I was already partly informed. The worst was the recent American material, where the author presumed I'd been either an attentive American news consumer or personally impacted/at risk from the fires in question. The net result there was that I'd have needed supplementary material to get more than general feelings about the time period and its problems.

Rated 3.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 1995
- Author (Stephen J. Pyne): male, United States, born in 1949, academic (environmental history), author not previously read
- English, public library, 379 pages, 3 stars
- read Sep 15-Oct 12, 2025, book not previously read

I don't recall how this got on my TBR list, but the topic is interesting, and my ignorance relatively profound. So most likely I simply thought learning more about fire might be a good idea.

106. Magi'i of Cyador by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 10th book in L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s sprawling Saga of Recluce fantasy series, and deals with an earlier time than most of the other books in the series - 2nd book chronologically, according to LibraryThing. It deals with a very talented young man in a culture that's portrayed somewhat sympathetically from the inside, but is IMO basically awful.

The culture is prone to intrigue, corruption, and lots of magically accomplished snooping. Anything one does might be spied on by a mage, and only a few can even detect when this occurs. It's strongly hierarchical, and unpleasantly sexist. It's also got the most advanced technology anywhere in its world, based on a blending of magic and machinery. People live well, when they aren't being forced into unwanted marriages, or into the military, or killed to cover up corruption, or by raiding barbarians that are rarely adequately handled.

Unfortunately, much of this tech is irreplaceable - the ancients who founded the culture brought it with them from off planet, or built it on planet with tools they brought which no longer exist. (They were, in fact, lost and stranded travelers from an interstellar civilization that would seem simply technological to the reader.

As the book begins, major artefacts are beginning to fail, as predicted by the ancients long ago. The answer is to cover this up as long as possible, squabbling and intriguing for power all the while. Our school boy, from a mage family, has the relatively rare magely ability to tell when someone is lying, so he learns about the problems early on, by asking ingenuous innocent-sounding questions.

The society is officially divided into 3 not quite castes: the magi'i, the mirror lancers (military), and the merchants. This doesn't count the overwhelming maturity of people, who are mere commoners, often peasants, but also servants, craftworkers, etc. (Merchants and their subordinates are the commonest category, more common than the other two combined, but still small.) They aren't quite castes, in that being born with magely talents can get one trained in magery and part of the magi'i, and failing to succeed in one's mage studies can get one essentially forced to become a Lancer officer. Also, while intermarriage is somewhat scandalous, mage-lancer and lancer-merchant pairings are not entirely unknown. (Note I'm referring to lancer officers here. Non-officers are recruited from commoners, though promotion from the ranks to officer sometimes happens. Presumably they generally marry other commoners, though possibly only after the end of their service.)

Our hero is booted out of mage school fairly early in the book, and sent for training as a lancer officer. We then follow his early career, in an organization that unofficially tries hard to make sure that mage-talented officers become dead heroes, lest they use their dual abilities to rebel against the emperor, as once happened successfully some time in the past.

I'd hate to live in that culture, even if I weren't female and thus suited only to the role of wife, or, if mage-talented, perhaps to the role of healer. But seeing someone else successfully handle the challenges of such a culture is very satisfying. That culture feels like it's only an intensification of the culture I live in, with a bit more explicit hierarchy. Lies? Intrigue? Powerful people who constantly scheme to become ever more powerful? Cliques, protegées, and rampant disloyalty? What's not to recognize, even before we get to the utter lack of any expectation of privacy?

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2000
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 19 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, inter-library loan, 544 pages, 4 stars
- read Oct 4-12, 2025; book previously read

107. Scion of Cyador by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 10th book in L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s Saga of Recluce fantasy series, and an immediate sequel to his Magi'i of Cyador. It follows the same character as the previous book, until his career reaches a point where he's far too powerful to be interesting to write about, without escalating the opposition beyond plausibility.

There's not much more I can say without all kinds of spoilers. This time, there is proportionately more intrigue - but there's still plenty of violence as well. Thing's end on a positive note, as Modesitt's books always do, but both the characters and the readers know that no fix lasts forever, and farthermore there are always new problems. We'll see the same nation again in another book of the series, in a much later period, as it is overrun and some of the survivors successfully flee. We also see it in still other books as part of ancient history.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), ?2000
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 20 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 541 pages, 4 stars
- read Oct 12-16, 2025; book previously read

108. Not by genes alone : how culture transformed human evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd

This is a book about evolutionary biology - with what may seem to many like quite a twist. The theory is that humans evolved a number of biological/genetic adaptations that promoted culture: i.e. non-genetic, learned ways of being. Humans (children and adults) learn from other humans. This means that when environments change, we don't need to wait for biological (genetic) evolution to adapt us to living well in the new environment - we can instead follow the much faster and somewhat more directed path of cultural evolution. We can also live in any number of different environments, facilitated by cultural (learned) ways of living well in each of them. And all this is supported by biological adaptations to make it easier to learn useful things. Moreover, like most evolved mechanisms, these adaptations have bugs, which can lead to cultural adaptations that may be useless or even actively detrimental to the well being of those who adopt them.

None of this strikes me as new, radical, or even innovative - in 2025. But the book was published in 2005, and I'm really not clear how developed or common this idea was twenty years ago, let alone how well known it was among people not working in biology or even anthropology. This might be a seminal book, at least as far as spreading the idea to lay readers. But then again, it might not be.

There are some problems with the book, at least to my eyes in 2025. On the one hand, I found at least one error - though once again, I'm not quite certain that the error would have been as obvious in 2005. (I learned the relevant information from a book published in 2013.) The authors are making a point about how cultural evolution can drive biological evolution; thus people living in cultures that keep cows (and other dairy animals?) evolved the ability to digest milk as adults - something many other human strains lack. So far so good - the problem is that the book only mentions this development among the people of Northwest Europe, and strongly implies this adaptation only happened in that area*. That's not in fact true - adaptations with this effect have evolved in at least five human populations**. Sometimes it's a genetic change - presumably not the exact same one in each group. And in at least one case the humans merely adapted by hosting gut microbes that would digest the milk for them.

This error seems kind of trivial, to be honest, but of course it might be the tip of an iceberg of factual errors I don't have the knowledge to recognize.

What's more important, though, is that it's part of a pattern with political relevance. We have Euro-centrism. We also have favorable mention of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology, which can easily be seen as a science-flavored apologia for human violence. We have a throw-away mention of the wealthy producing fewer offspring than the average person (p.246). And we have never-ending concern about reproductive success, as measured in the form of babies. Yes, "reproductive success" matters for any biological evolution, unless the gene concerned has other means of spreading (some bacteria swap genes without splitting, and split without swapping genes). And it's an important point that cultural ideas may spread without promoting reproductive success - consider all the religious sects that require or encourage celibacy. But that doesn't seem to me to require chapters full of detail about how this might work - particularly when that's very much a matter of might, with little or no evidence for the specifics.***

Net result: I'd like to read other books on this topic, ideally including lots of books that cite this one, with emphasis on critiques. Right wing politics - and blind spots - don't prevent high quality science, any more than left wing politics and blind spots do. But both do tend to make good science more difficult, and make me very interested in the responses of scientists with different politics and/or blindspots.

I expect I'll find significant differences of detail, with different (or perhaps fewer) just-so stories. But my overall impression from other reading is that the basic thesis is sound, and not especially contested. Any devil here is probably in the details.

Meanwhile, it would be interesting to read the author's take on the relative evolutionary success of humans, chickens, and cockroaches. Both of the latter have followed humans into pretty much every environment, and have population numbers greatly exceeding those of humans.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, biology, series: n/a, 2005
- Author 1 (Peter J. Richerson): male, United States, born in 1943, academic (biology), author not previously read
- Author 2 (Robert Boyd): male, United States, born in 1948, academic (anthropology), author not previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 332 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Sep 21-Oct 16, 2025, book not previously read

(*) See pages 191-192

(**) See Paleofantasy by biologist Marlene Zuk.

(***) Biologists and others refer to this kind of discourse as just so stories.

109. Wellspring of Chaos by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 12th book in L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s Saga of Recluce fantasy series. It begins a 2 book sub-series, following the same character. Somewhat unusually for Modesitt, this book is nothing like a bildungsroman. The main character starts as an established craftsman, with his own shop, and two near adult sons.

I've been rereading a selected subset of Modesitt's novels, in part to counterbalance the emotional fallout from ongoing political events, and help me process them. All the books I selected - and especially liked - feature a character dealing with a cryptic and obviously unjust political situation. Sometimes he or she winds up supporting or evolving the status quo; more often they wind up making drastic changes, either to their own life (uprooting themself) or to the local situation, or, sometimes, both. All these characters - and indeed, most of Modesitt's central characters - are unusually talented overachievers, so eventually reach a point where they can do-unto-others more than be-done-to. Their choices remain constrained, but they always eventually have at least as much political influence as an Elon Musk, if not a Winston Churchill.

Explaining how this book fits that pattern would require many spoilers, so I'll skip that bit. (You can probably find it in every other review, not to mention (probably) the publisher's blurb - which I can no longer easily find on LibraryThing, thanks to not-so-recent updates to the work's page.)*

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2004
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 21 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 400 pages, 4 stars
- read Oct 17-20, 2025; book previously read

* See https://www.librarything.com/topic/368659 posts 109-114 for an explanation of this problem, and how to work around it.

110. Ordermaster by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is the 13th book in L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s Saga of Recluce fantasy series, and the last of the ones I'd picked out to reread. It's an immediate sequel to my #109, Wellspring of Chaos.

As is typical of the final book in a Modesitt sub-series, the viewpoint character is becoming scarily competent, and by the end of the book they will get too powerful for any reasonable sequel. (Opposition that would actually challenge them would require bending the parameters of the world they live in; Modesitt consistently has the sense not to do this.)

As always, I enjoyed the read, not entirely because I imagined myself as that main character, able to deal with things rather than merely coping with them. It would be nice to be so powerful one can threaten rulers into improving their behaviour, not to mention deposing or killing those who've gone beyond the pale.

It would also involve one in a bazillion temptations, moral dilemmas, and similar. Modesitt characters tend to notice these issues, sometimes struggle with them, and do their best regardless. The first time I read any of these books, I barely noticed that part, except as window dressing to make them more relatable, and a bit less super human. This time around, that's a good part of what I'm noticing and appreciating. There's still an adventure story, where the character(s) we sympathize with wind up victorious and presumed to live happily ever after. But there have been tradeoffs and compromises all the way along.

Too many people are dead as a result of the adventure aspects, many of them guilty of no more than being drafted or otherwise having little option but to support those more actively evil. The hero has had to repeatedly compromise with "the way things are done", supporting flawed rulers who are at least better than the alternative, which might be a decades long civil war. They've enabled elites who are no better or more deserving than the desperately impoverished - even if they've dealt with especially egregious elite individuals, and helped or tried to help a few of the most desperate. And they've become part of the establishment themselves - in this case, become a medieval style lord, granted estates the king he's repeatedly saved. Sure, they treat their own subordinates generously and fairly, rather than greedily and abusively - but they remain subordinates, with no prospect of becoming lords themselves. And heavens knows how many generations it will take for the hero's heirs to become classic selfish lordlings, or even the sort of treacherous, rabidly abusive lordlings the hero has helped to defeat, and sometimes slain.

This appeals to me currently. Part of that is related to relatively recent political events, and my attempts to integrate them into my worldview. Part of it is related to my age - I'm past the point of striving, more like the heroes at the point the author has no more plausible plots for them, except nowhere near as powerful. And part of it is probably my temperament - I often feel like society makes no sense, with other people's actions tending arbitrary, selfish, and often vicious, not to mention frequently dishonest. It's nice to see someone else making good in spite of having to deal with humans and their often rather noxious social habits and customs.

Except of course even that judgment is unfair - some of the time, people are both altruistic and kind. Or at least act that way. Their societies are designed in part to avoid the most egregious abuses. Legal systems are flawed, but generally better than the law of vendetta. Governments are generally run in part for the benefit of their leaders, their staff, and the social elite - at the expense of everyone else. But only partly - they also make numerous attempts to serve the common good, and to help those spectacularly unfortunate.

In another mood, I'd want to read stories of systems working for that common good, and in particular for non-elite individuals. And in fact these Modesitt stories can be read that way. There are people doing their public service jobs well and reasonably fairly, as well as egregious grifters. And the hero always attempts to serve the general good, as they understand it. (They just never fully succeed - tradeoffs and feasibility always limit their effects.)

For now, these novels all hit the spot, and I'm sorry to have finished my selection of currently most appealing Modesitt novels.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2005
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 22 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, inter-library loan, 494 pages, 4 stars
- read Oct 20-22, 2025; book previously read

111. Rulers, religion, and riches : why the West got rich and the Middle East did not by Jared Rubin

This book claims that the reason that parts of Europe advanced economically compared to the Middle East was that religion and in particular religious elites had less of a seat at the government table, while economic elites had more. This resulted in policies that, comparatively speaking, made economic advancement easier. They also tended to farther reduce the ability of religion and its elites to influence government policy, forming a virtuous circle.

It implies a farther claim, that this pattern applies wherever religion - or economic elites - are a mainstay of government legitimation and support. But that claim is later hedged around with ifs, ands and buts. The later parts of the book even hedge the claim that economic elite influence is always beneficial.

I am not convinced. I'll agree that in Europe, in the Industrial Revolution, and somewhat earlier and later, what the bourgeoise collectively demanded was eventually good for overall economic prosperity. I'm not clear that the bourgeois were the "economic elite" throughout these period - there was a lot of landed wealth, extracting income from estates, particularly at the beginning. I'm not clear that concessions to bourgeois interests demands provided prosperity for the average Joe in the early stages of this transition, or that capitalism, rather than colonialism, was the main driver of the eventual comparative prosperity of the average farm or industrial worker. These things are assumed in this book rather than defended. Worse, some of them are assumed early in the book, and then hedged later.

All in all, the book states a popular theory of economic advancement, updated into modern terminology (I've retrojected terms like "bourgeois" in place of terms like "economic elite"; my terminology comes from versions of the same basic theory taught to children in the 1960s and 1970s.) It provides elements of history that support this theory - teaching me bits of e.g. Ottoman history that I didn't already know. But I don't think it adequately supports its theory.

I read this book because I was rather impressed by How the World Became Rich, which I read earlier this year; Jared Rubin is one of its authors. I wanted to read more by either or both authors.

That book discusses multiple theories attempting to explain Europe's escape from the Malthusian Trap via the Industrial and Scientific Revolution, and then presents its own theory which is not the same as the one given here. It was published 5 years after Rulers, Religion, and Riches - I guess Rubin's answer to this question changed in the course of those five years.

Overall, an OK book, but not as good as the one the author co-wrote 5 years later.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2017
Author (Jared T. Rubin): male, United States(?), age unknown, academic (economics), co-author of my #67 for 2025
- English, inter-library loan, 273 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Oct 1-22, 2025, book not previously read

112. Infinite life : the revolutionary story of eggs, evolution and life on earth by Jules Howard

This book tells the story of the evolution of eggs and egg-like structures, from the Hadean Eon 4,540 million years ago to the present time. Other relevant organs are also discussed: wombs and womb-like organs, marsupial pouches, and placentas.

The book is arranged as a series of 11 chapters, each devoted to a range of time, from earlier to later. There's some discussion of what else was going on in a given era, recognizing that the average lay person won't know, e.g., the state of life on Earth in the Ordovician period.

It's almost all stuff I'd already encountered, but with the emphasis changed. That's OK, particularly when it's well-executed, but not overly exciting. (Another reader's mileage might well vary.)

Overall, this was a decent book. It's a fine choice if you want to read something about this topic.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, biology, series: n/a, 2024
Author (Jules Howard): male, Great Britain), age unknown, science writer, author not previously read
- English, public library, 258 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Oct 17-26, 2025, book not previously read

This book was recommended to me by Library Thing's new recommendation system.

113. The collapsing empire by John Scalzi

This science fiction novel was the first fruits of my exploration of The Storygraph as a source for fiction recommendations. (I may have already finished at east one non-fiction it recommended, and there's another fiction I started before this that I haven't finished.) It was either never recommended to me by LibraryThing, or never stood out among its flood of recommendations, in spite of me having 6 (now 7) of John Scalzi's books in my library.

It turned out to be somewhat of a curate's egg - except in this case the first 80% or so of the book was great, and the last 20% made me wonder whether the author was either losing it entirely or, more likely, doing whatever he could get away with because of being a Big Name (TM). Given that the author claims to have been, unusually, late with this book, due to stress related to politics, I suspect he finished it up in a tearing hurry, cutting any corner he could get away with. What a pity.

Let me start with the first 80%. As a modern author, he starts with three short sections having different locations and view point characters. Being an unusually competent modern author, two of the three are plainly encountering the same problem, which will obviously be the focus of the book. All three viewpoints give us a very clear and useful picture of the society and technology of the world we're visiting. They are also funny, with characters I kind of like. Two of the characters continue to be important viewpoint characters. The third, who never reappears except through other characters' viewpoints, is in a section clearly labeled something like "prologue".

There's a serious problem that needs to be dealt with, lest the emperor fall and most (perhaps all) of its inhabitants perish. The problem is, for once, mostly the result of natural causes, exacerbated by human decisions, mostly ancient, that never anticipated such a problem, even though two smaller but similar events are known historically.

There's also a collection of selfish bastards, many quite powerful, working for their own advancement. Their activities interfere with attempting to cope with the major problem, even though - in story/plot terms - there seems to be no need for them to be quite so effective. The scale of the natural disasters predicted is quite enough for an excellent plot, along with normal (non-malicious) human tendencies.

That's gotten me into the last 20%, which seems hurried and a bit over the top. Several things are handled clumsily, not just the activities of the major ultra-selfish noble house. More than this would be too much like spoilers. But the author would perhaps have done better not to pseudo-resolve the issues at the end of the book - as an unstoppable, essentially unmitigated catastrophe - while leaving space for a sequel that (I hope) will somehow miraculously accomplish the impossible, saving the characters I like, rather than merely chronicling the downward spiral and eventual mass deaths.

Sure enough, this turned out to be the first volume of three. I absolutely won't purchase them, but will at least start the second volume if I can acquire it through the local library system. It could turn out more like the first 80% of this one, and get rated 4+. But then again, it could also be more like the final 20%, and wind up as a DNF.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, first of a series, 2017
- Author (John Scalzi): male, American, born 1969, novelist (science fiction), author previously read
- English, public library, 333 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Oct 26-28, 2025; book not previously read

p.s. This is not a funny/comic story, nor yet a dreadful story played for laughs. The funny parts are enjoyable, but aren't the prime ingredient of the story. Think of them as raisins in your breakfast cereal.

p.p.s. This book was recommended to me by Storygraph.

I am way behind on tabulating books read this year - still working on June. Worse, I just discovered that in numbering them I went from book 55 straight to 66. I don't think I'm up for fixing the mess - too many posts to edit, and they then lose info on the date they were posted, but perhaps my next book will be numbered 56.

I've made it to September with the great book tabulation, in part because of waking up in the middle of the night last night.

56*. Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty by Adam Kucharski

This is a book about ways of determining what is most likely to true, and whether we are sure enough of that answer to use it for a particular purpose. It's not really about either proof or certainty, in spite of the title and subtitle.

It focusses on good methods of doing this, not the slap dash heuristics programmed into humans by evolution, and resorted to whenever haste, emotion, or simple laziness get involved.

It does this via examples of specific types of situations, including cases where different groups of people use somewhat different rules in the same situation whether because of history or subtle differences in values. Thus we see legal decision making, along with attempts to decide on good policy during a pandemic (covid) when far too much was unknown - or even "known" but incorrect. We see developments in mathematics and geometry, when things every educated person knew were questioned and overthrown. We even see arguments about the best strategy for the Monty Hall problem, and inflamed reactions to disagreement about that strategy.

Overall it's a good book, but (a) it needs to get rid of the misleading title and (b) it would help to have fewer cutesy chapter titles, and more that indicate the chapter's actual topic, though that problem arrives mostly when looking back to find something you're sure you read earlier in the book. (To have your cake and eat it too, either use cutesy subtitles, or attach straightforward subtitles to your cutesy titles).

Statistics:
- non-fiction, non-fiction, epistemology, series: n/a, 2025
Author (Adam Kucharski): male, Great Britain, age unknown, academic (mathematics, infectious disease epidemiology), author not previously read
- English, public library, 357 pages, 4 stars
- read Oct 17-31, 2025, book not previously read

I borrowed this book because of a recommendation in Jenn Dowd's substack Data For Health

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

Pearl Rule 6. To each this world by Julie Czerneda

This is a science fiction novel. The author tends to avoid the beaten track, and base her stories on new premises.

After 12 pages, I didn't like where the story appeared to be going, and went more than 2 weeks without picking it up again. In fact, I found myself kind of dreading the "need" to make some progress so as to finish it became due at the library. So I pearl ruled it.

I don't think it's a bad book. It just wasn't the shallow mindless escapism that I really wanted. It was going to make me think, and bad things were probably going to happen to good people, most likely in job lots, leading to an uneasy and none too satisfying resolution.

I'm pearl ruling it, rather than putting it in the "abandoned without prejudice" list, because I really don't see myself ever going back to it.

--

This book was recommended to me by Storygraph.

>171 ArlieS: I've liked quite a few of Julia Czerneda's books, but that seemed too long for what it offered.

>166 ArlieS: Eggs fascinate me, so I've added that one to my MBR. They're fascinating and complex ways to begin life, with lots to recommend them to creatures who need lots of offspring fast.

Happy weekend-ahead's reads, Arlie.

>172 quondame: In a different mood, I might have liked this one. But I fear I'll be an escapism-seeking-grouch for the foreseeable future, though partly because when I have the emotional energy for downer reading I use it for non-fiction.

>173 richardderus: I got you with a BB?! I'm so proud of myself! And turnabout *is* fair play.

>174 ArlieS: If you haven't indulged in The Hands of the Emperor, I don't think it can be surpassed for escapism. So many easy reading pages of well meaning people, with just enough snarls in past and present to give dimension.

>175 quondame: Thank you. The title was so familiar I thought I had read it, but nope. I had the author confused with Katherine Addison. Thank you for the timely addition to my TBR.

>176 ArlieS: Many, many fans of The Goblin Emperor adore The Hands of the Emperor. Victoria Goddard herself is a fan of tGE.

>177 quondame: My silly local library only has it as an ebook, as does the less local one where I also have a card, so I've just ordered a paper copy from a neighboring library via our inter-library loan network.

(Nothing against those who like ebooks, and if my vision ever gets bad enough, they'll be an alternative to large print books. But I just don't want to read on screen as long as I have any alternative.)

>178 ArlieS: It's such a huge book, and I understand that the print size is not over generous. Of course, with how many times I've read it and its sequel, my arm muscles would be well worked out.

57. Pox romana : the plague that shook the Roman world by Colin P. Elliott

This book is about the Antonine plague, and history of the Roman Empire centered on the middle of the second century AD, aka the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

The author doesn't think much of the Romans. To hear him tell it, their cities were massively unhealthy, with the famous baths making things worse rather than better. Their economy became more and more government directed, ensuring failure. It was, in fact, not the modern United States and thus obviously made of fail, in spite of successes at e.g. imposing peace and enhancing trade before the period covered.

At it happens, we don't actually know very much about the Antonine plague. How many people did it kill? What disease was it? When did it end, or perhaps become endemic? It's pretty much all speculation, though with some grounding in evidence.

The author discusses this evidence, and also describes the state of the Roman Empire before, during and after. Things got worse, and continued to get worse thereafter, with some good periods.

He can't really demonstrate how much this plague, or any later plague contributed to the decline. But he tries, giving us what evidence he can.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2024
Author (Colin P. Elliott): male, United States, age unknown, academic (history and classics), author not previously read
- English, public library, 304 pages, 3 stars
- read Oct 30-Nov 8, 2025, book not previously read

This book has shown up on recommendation lists, I think, but I read it because my housemate brought it home from the library, so I started it once she had finished reading it.

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

>180 ArlieS: It's the "what disease was it" question I'd most likely to see an answer attempted for...somewhere along the line I saw a speculation it was measles, which would be really interesting.

Sounds like his parti pris really got in his way, though, so I'll pass on that read.

>181 richardderus: It might have been something that no longer exists. IIRC, there's some possibility it was something in the pox family, worse than chickenpox but maybe not as bad as smallpox. Or maybe it was an early form of smallpox, which became nastier later. Or maybe I'm mixing this up with speculation about some other plague - the book went back to the library yesterday, so I can't check it, and he did discuss later plagues a little bit.

Oh, have you heard of Corban Loosestrife Saga? I found them the most readable and relatable of Celia Holland's books, and she is a good author who pays attention to historical sources.

>184 quondame: These are totally new to me. I've added them to The List (TM).

>185 ArlieS: I hope you enjoy them. I found the quite out of the ordinary for both (late) Viking era stories and general magic touched historical stories.

58*. The language puzzle : piecing together the six-million-year story of how words evolved by Steven J. Mithen

This book presents the author's take on how and when humans and proto-humans developed language. It directly contradicts Noam Chomsky's theory also presented in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. It does not, however, address the evidence for rejecting that theory - it merely cites a 2003 article by Nicholas Evans who, Mithen claims, totally demolished their theory. Of course that article appeared in an academic journal, difficult for mere lay people to access. But Mithen doesn't seem to feel a need to explain; he merely tells us how these things really work (sic).

I rather suspect that Mithen knows what he's talking about, and Evans pointed out real flaws in Chomsky's work, probably based on clever new research. Mithen is merely a pompous academic who doesn't feel a need to justify his opinions to anyone but his peers. But of course I can't know that, and so found this style rather off-putting.

Related to this flaw, the book is pretty much a take it or leave it presentation. I can't tell which of his assertions are ill supported and commonly questioned in the academic literature, and which might be rock solid. I'm not a specialist in the field, so I only found one questionable assertion of fact, involving the prevalence of synesthesia in early hominids - how on earth would that be determined, other than by consulting the author's intuition, or simply asserting it because it makes his overall theory rather more plausible. (IF there are genes associated with synesthesia in modern humans, and IF those versions of the genes are more common in the DNA of archaic hominids, that might provide some plausibility. But I doubt we know the modern genetics.)

It's still a decent book, and quite possibly right in its main contentions
a) language predates homo sapiens
b) language of a sort can develop without specialized language learning and language using routines/instincts in the species developing it, using more generalized structures, learning methods, etc.

On the other hand:
c) It seems possible to me that some amount of specialized structures/instincts evolved which enhanced already existing language, leading to a virtuous circle, and also to Chomsky's results. Mithen insists nothing of the sort ever happened.
d) It seems more than possible that Mithen's best guess at exactly which hominids developed language is off by some huge amount, but I'll accept his suggestion that Neanderthals (and presumably Denosivans) also had language, and it might have arrived much earlier.

Overall it's worth reading, if you are at all interested in the subject, and I appreciate it breaking new ground - new, at least, in lay accessible writing. But it could have been better.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, human evolution, series: n/a, 2024
Author (Steven J. Mithen): male, Great Britain, born in 1960, academic (archaeology), author previously read
- English, public library, 534 pages, 4 stars
- read Oct 24-Nov 12, 2025, book not previously read

I failed to record why I borrowed this book from the library.

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

I have accomplished a minor miracle. All the books I've finished have been duly recorded in these 2 threads, and all the books recorded there have also been added to my tabulation of cumulative results for the year.

I've read 45,726 total pages in 106 books. 55 were fiction and 50 were non-fiction. They had 76 distinct authors. Of the repeat authors, one appears 23 times - the next most read this year only 12. The earliest copyright was 1954. OTOH, 40 books had copyrights on or after 2020.

Of the authors, 55 were male and 21 were female. 47 were American, 15 were British, and no other nationality got more than 4. The earliest author birth year was 1926; the latest was 1996. (I was unable to determine birth years for 22 of the authors; those tend to skew younger and less famous.)

100 books came from libraries; 7 of those by inter-library loan. The other 6 came from my own shelves. None were purchased this year, or within 6 months of being read.

Future predictions: I currently have 12 library books on hand, and 2 books from my own shelves in the near term pile. Many of these will be finished before the end of December, but possibly not all, and I may well acquire and read others, particularly fiction. (Only 3 of those on hand are fiction, though one of those is 899 pages long, so may well take me a while to finish.)

As an accountant, I appreciate nerdy statistics. Looks like you're having a fine reading year!

>189 ChrisG1: Nerds FTW!

59*. The consuming fire by John Scalzi

This is the second volume in the science fiction series started with my #113. It's still got more politics than I'd prefer, and less about the nitty-gritty of surviving the coming changes to interstellar travel. It has, however, gotten rid of the actual flaws I described in the first volume - this one didn't have a feeling of a rushed and inappropriate ending. (My other two complaints are matters of taste, not competence.)

There are surprises I didn't expect, beyond "what will the plotters do next?". These involve both science and history. There are changes to the scientific understanding of the expected changes. There are new revelations about what the characters consider ancient history, with potential modern day consequences. I particularly appreciated the surprises from the scientists, while being somewhat annoyed about the characters' understanding of their past being essentially upended.

Overall, it's an enjoyable read, rated by me much the same as its predecessor, but with different reasons for not being rated higher.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2018
- Author (John Scalzi): male, American, born 1969, novelist (science fiction), author of my #113 for 2025
- English, public library, 316 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Nov 13-18, 2025; book not previously read

I read this book as a result of reading the immediately previous volume of its series. which had been recommended to me by Storygraph, and which I gave a rather mixed review. See post 167 in the current thread.

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

60*. War! What is it good for? : conflict and the progress of civilization from primates to robots by Ian Morris

This was an interesting book, in several senses of the word. It's easy to parody the positions taken, oversimplifying the arguments and portraying the author as a right wing technophilic nutball. But on the other hand, it's also a serious attempt at global historical analysis, with strong ideas that deserve a respectful hearing, rather than mere mockery. Sadly, though, I'm more fitted to mock than to consider, not being a professional historian myself.

The basic thesis of this book is that conquest is good for eventual prosperity. Bigger is better when it comes to political units, and they mostly (the author implies always) get large over the violent objections of whatever peoples are absorbed into them. Certainly the people of the political unit that conquers its neighbours do better than those conquered, and there's much suffering and destruction in the process, but all (the survivors, or more likely their descendants) do better in the long run - as averages, if not as individuals.

The benefits are not just economic - or not primarily economic. The larger the political unit, and the greater its state capacity, the more it enforces a monopoly on violence, and the less likely any of its subjects/citizens are to die violently. (By implication, never clearly stated, this is true even if it routinely kills its own subjects, whether judicially or via government-caused famines and similar.) The theorized cause is that governments are "stationary bandits", who return to the same income sources year after year. You can't get tax revenue from a corpse, so government leaders realize that they need to farm their victims (subjects), rather than simply hunting them.

Even better than this, perhaps, is the situation where a powerful polity doesn't bother officially conquering and ruling the world. It merely enforces its own rules on everyone, otherwise leaving them to get on with being customers, suppliers, etc. to that polity. Thus British rule of the seas, and enforcement of free trade, as well as controlling a significant empire. And thus, also, modern American hegemony.

So far so good, though I do feel that I've inserted nuance in my description that was absent from the book.

There's also an interesting discussion of the theory of a "western way of war", that basically demolishes the idea, attributing it primarily to ignorance on the part of its supporters.

But the rest of the book invites parody, and takes the earlier (and much larger) portions down by association. It's written in 2014, and postulates an ongoing and perhaps expanding role for the United States as globocop, rather than the agent of chaos it's become under Trump. And far worse, he expects this to be temporary, until the arrival of The Singularity in approximately 2040. (As described, the proposed changes are AFAICT flat out impossible - the author appears to worship digital tech without understanding, and so exaggerates its potential.)

Combine that with what feels to me like inadequate nuance in the early parts, and a basic thesis that smells off" to me - was a slave in any period truly better off than they would have been without the war that enslaved their great grandparents? Is the author using averages to focus on improvements at the top while ignoring dis-improvement at the bottom? Add to this the whiff of US right wing politics, making me inclined to be more careful than usual about whether the author is cherry-picking data, or even making things up. I have to say the theory is interesting, but I'd need to read critical responses to even develop an opinion about what parts of it might be true.

Still, it was worth reading, and furthermore gave me several new terms: "stationary bandit", "globo-cop", and "lucky latitudes" - this third being areas where developing farming made sense, and so occurred.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2014
- Author (Ian M. Morris): male, Great Britain, born in 1960, academic (history, archaeology), author previously read
- English, public library, 495 pages, 4 stars
- read Nov 8-23, 2025, book not previously read

I added this book to my TBR after noticing it in the bibliography of The WEIRDest people in the world

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

>192 ArlieS: You do find some interesting books. The idea of the magical "singularity" that will overtake history strikes me as silly, but I can see there are some provocative ideas worth chewing on here.

>193 ChrisG1: I read a lot of bibliographies, looking for books of possible interest. Sometimes a book that wasn't great itself references other books I find a lot more interesting. That seems to get me more outliers than simply following automated recommendations.

Some of them are stinkers, of course, but I can rule out a lot of those by reading about them on LibraryThing before borrowing them. And when all else fails, I'm learning to use the magic of DNF.

Blessedly, we have an excellent local library system, so I'm not pouring money into a black hole, buying books that turn out to be useless, just to get a good breadth of input.

61* The hands of the emperor : a novel of the nine worlds by Victoria Goddard

This huge novel was recommended to me by Susan (quondame) in this thread. I loved it, and will now be happily tracking down the author's other work.

It is however hard to describe, and even harder to describe without spoilers. It's fantasy, in that its universe is permeated with magic - but our viewpoint character is no magic user, and it doesn't follow any common fantasy tropes. The fantasy elements of the universe are important, but the story isn't about magic.

The book starts slowly. We see enough to be interested, but we don't see what will become the overarching themes at all clearly, until perhaps the middle of the book. It seems to be an engaging story about commonplace trivia, set in a magic driven world. Our viewpoint widens only slowly. Each enlargement is interesting in itself, and consistent with the earlier writing - but not expected, at least not by this reader - even though it may be somewhat foreshadowed.

This leaves me unable to describe the plot without massive spoilers. So let me just say that if you want to read an upbeat story about life, friendship, and even politics in a rather different universe, run out and get this book. If, on the other hand, you are looking for high adventure, or generic sword and sorcery, or even cosy sword-and-sorcery, this isn't the fantasy novel you are looking for.

Rated 4, after dithering between 4 and 4.5. Too bad I can't rate it at 4.25.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, first of a series, 2019
- Author (Victoria Goddard): female, Canadian, age unknown, writer (literary fantasy), author not previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 899 pages, 4 stars
- read Nov 17-Dec 13, 2025; book not previously read

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

>195 ArlieS: I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I love the flow of her storytelling as much as the characters, values, and world building.

I’d suggest Petty Treasons next to get HR’s post Fall intro to Cliopher, followed by Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander for Buru Tovo (and a splash of Aya).

>196 quondame: Those are both going to be inter-library loans. Thee's something wrong with the taste of my local librarians ;-)

62* The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper

This book is an entry in a crowded field: the question of why the Roman Empire fell/why the western Roman Empire fell. The author's answer is a combination of climate change and disease.

Note that we're not talking about anthropogenic climate change here - rather, the empire developed during a period where climate was relatively favorable in much of the relevant area - this changed, as such things do, making life and food production harder and less predictable/reliable.

As for disease - any chronology of the Roman Empire has multiple entries like "Plague of Justinian," "Plague of Cyprian," and "Antonine Plague". These were major episodes, on top of the more usual endemic diseases and local epidemics, which were pretty much constant. The result was population crashes, with recovery tending not to be complete when yet another major epidemic or pandemic hit.

When I was first learning history, we had only literary references to these plagues, and the odd tombstone. It was not entirely obvious how severe each one had been, let alone what the disease agent might have been. And the Roman Empire didn't leave reliable census info, in general - we don't know populations before or after these epidemics. We just knew that authors say there was trouble recruiting enough soldiers, and later even enough farmers and craftspeople.

Enter the archaeologists, equipped with DNA sequencing technology. They can often identify the type of disease - and they report see such nasties as bubonic plague and smallpox. Those are major killers, particularly in an unexposed population. Maybe they were less severe in their earlier/original forms. And maybe they were worse. Plus they've been digging up mass graves, and comparing them e.g. with the size of the settlement that created them. We have a somewhat better idea of mortality now.

The author uses these sources to produce a more-or-less narrative history of the Roman Empire's fall, focussed on plagues and similar.

I enjoyed it, though perhaps not as much as the same author's Plagues upon the earth : disease and the course of human history, which I read in 2023.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2017
- Author(Kyle Harper): male, American, born 1979, academic (classics), author previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 419 pages, 4 stars
- read Nov 24-Dec 16, 2025, book not previously read

This book was recommended to me by LJ's new recommendation system, but I'd probably have eventually read it anyway because of how much I liked the author's Plagues upon the earth

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

63*. The eternal frontier : an ecological history of North America and its peoples by Tim F. Flannery

This book looks at the flora and fauna of North America as they changed over the past 65 million years.

The first part was fascinating. This is a long enough time spawn for continents to have moved significantly, with North America having connections to different continents at different times. There were also of course wild changes in climate, mass extinctions and such. I'd never before looked at that broad paleontological story from the viewpoint of a single part of the crust.

The second part was pedestrian. As soon as humans arrive on the continent, it becomes a story of human-created extinctions and similar. This gets stronger once Europeans arrive, continuing into the projected future. I've read it all before, and it didn't feel like it fit with the approach taken in the early part of the book. I could have done without the same old stories of passenger pigeons, bison, etc.

One thing perhaps didn't get emphasized enough: the author has a theory that North America, because of its shape, orientation and perhaps its current location, experiences amplified effects from changes of average temperature. I can't explain how this works without quoting the author extensively, so I won't. But I'd like to have read a bit more about this, including citations that would have told me whether this is generally agreed upon, new and exciting, or this particular author's quirky hobby horse.

At any rate, I averaged ratings of 5 (for the pre-human part) and 3 (for the part after human arrival) and rated the book at 4 stars.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, paleontology, series: n/a, 2001
- Author (Tim F. Flannery): male, Australian, born 1956; paleontologist, climate change activist, and more (counted as academic); author not previously read
- English, public library, 404 pages, 4 stars
- read Nov 22-Dec 21, 2025, book not previously read

This book was recommended to me by Storygraph.

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

9 more days in the year, and 2 more books to go just to fill in the gap in sequence numbers.

Fortunately I have 4 books in flight, so I'll probably manage to hit that target.

>200 ArlieS: I hope that works, Arlie. If you celebrate, remember:

Merry Christmas, Arlie!

>202 quondame: Thanks and same to you Susan

Have a lovely festive season, dear Arlie

>204 PaulCranswick: Thank you, Paul, and the same to you.

64*. The last Emperox by John Scalzi

This is the third and final volume in the Interdependency, a science fiction series I started this November. In terms of the overarching plot, and its twists, this series steps outside the standard science fiction pattern, and I'm not sure I like the result. I kept wanting it to follow the well trodden path, often clearly foreshadowed - and instead it went in directions that were harder on characters I'd come to like. Yet at the same time then ending of the third volume is more hopefully than I could have expected.

One primary character is a scientist, continually discovering more about the society-ending problem discovered early in the first volume. Another becomes the head of state of that society in the first book, and is faced with innumerable political problems. They also become lovers, and wish to marry. A third is a spoiled aristocrat with an overgrown sex drive, who starts the series with a philosophy of selfish hedonism, but outgrows it.

Most of the other characters are either red shirts, or atrocious examples of over-privileged, selfish, dishonest, political assholes, happy to murder anyone, including family, to achieve their political aims. (There is one fairly honest and honorable bishop.) These folks are really nasty, and we get to look into the head of the worst of them, who sees absolutely nothing wrong with her attitudes and behaviour. She is in fact a main character, but enabled by what appear to be the majority of her fellow nobles.

Etc. etc. etc. The plot twists. A very few assholes grow out of it. Most continue their evil ways. Any victory from those trying to do basic things - like save as many people as possible from impending doom - gets re-sabotaged by those seeking only power and status. Each book ends with such a temporary victory - and the opposition never seems to be weakened for more than weeks, if not days.

The author, John Scalzi, has always had a dark side, but this may be worse in that way than any of his other series. Yet when they aren't murdering each other, the books are funny, and people have normal, even common emotional experiences. I can't regret reading this series, but I wish it had gone in other directions.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2020
- Author (John Scalzi): male, American, born 1969, novelist (science fiction), author of my #113 and #59 for 2025
- English, public library, 318 pages, 3 stars
- read Dec 24-26, 2025; book not previously read

I read this book as a result of reading the other 2 volumes of its series.

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

>206 ArlieS: The Interdependency is my least favorite Scalzi - in fact I DNF'd the third volume, as I just didn't care about any of the characters enough to bother. It happens.

>207 ChrisG1: I liked the Emperox herself, and the scientist.

The rest, not so much.

65. Women's work : the first 20,000 years : women, cloth, and society in early times by Elizabeth J. Wayland Barber

This is a history and pre-history of spinning, weaving and associated technologies, focussed in part on what we can know of the women who did and organized the work. It ends more or less when and where weaving - or at least weaving for more than household use - became a man's job.

It's written for lay people more interested in women's lives than the technology itself, who may well know less about it than I do, simply from a little reading of history and having used a couple of modern looms in childhood.

Nonetheless it's an interesting book, and I learned plenty I didn't know, notably about types of looms and the areas/peoples that used the different variants. (In one area, looms were vertical, with weights keeping the warp threads taught; in another area, looms were horizontal, laid out on the ground. Each design seems to have spread separately, both presumably derived from the most primitive looms which could only make ultra-narrow strips of cloth.)

The author has apparently also written more academic work on early loom technology and its diffusion. This was her follow up, more about the people than the looms.

It has some flaws, notably she takes Marija Gimbutas as a reliable authority, with no sign of awareness of just how controversial she is, or has become. And I believe Gimbutas was already controversial in 1994, when the book was published - relying on her has long been taken as a sign of credulous feminist history, acceptable in certain women's studies departments but but commonly not in history departments.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, (pre-)history of technology (weaving), series: n/a, 1994
- Author (Elizabeth J. Wayland Barberry): female, American, born 1940; academic (archaeology, linguistics, textiles and folk dance); author not previously read
- English, public library, 334 pages, 4 stars
- read Dec 19-26, 2025, book not previously read

I failed to record how this book got onto my TBR list.

* Numbers out of sequence to correct an error made in June, where I accidentally skipped #s 56-65. I'll use those numbers out of sequence, then continue with #114

>209 ArlieS: Womens' Work remains one of my favorite NF books and certainly the one I've given to friends and others the most often. It's so pleasant to read. I've gone to a couple of E.W. Barber's talks - she's semi-local and they too were interesting and lively.

114. The Third Reich at war by Richard J. Evans

This is the third and final volume in an excellent series about the Third Reich. It covers the period when Germany was at war, but is not a story of the war per se. The war is included, but this is not a military history, and the focus is on the Reich - people and government - not the war.

Given what Hitler and his people were doing, and (mostly later) what they were experiencing, it's very much what I call a "downer topic" in an early post of my 2026 thread. I can only handle a limited amount of such reading emotionally, and it's likely to take me rather a while to finish. So I try to read only the best work(s) on any particular downer topic, and this series came well recommended.

It has taught me a lot, and much of it was things I was surprised not to have already known.

Strong recommend.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2008
- Author (Richard J. Evans): male, Great Britain, born in 1947, academic (history), author of my #53 and #102 for 2025
- English, public library, 926 pages, 4 stars
- read Oct 8-Dec 27, 2025, book not previously read

This series was a book bullet from drneutron.

With this book, I'm finally back at accurate sequence numbers.

Pearl rule 7. Foreign bodies : pandemics, vaccines, and the health of nations by Simon Schama

This book is supposed to be about human response to disease, pandemics etc.. The first section, however, consists primarily of preaching about human-caused environmental problems. I didn't make it through page 8 before deciding that the library can have it back, unread.

Presumably the author feels that everyone needs to read his sermons more than they need to read about the topic they came for, which they expected from his title and his publisher's blurb. And of course there are some connections between his various topics and human diseases, which he could use to excuse the bait-and-switch.

Nonetheless, I'm out of here, even though the book does have endnotes.

I think rejecting a book this early - after taking the trouble to borrow it - is some kind of record for me.

I suspect from the table of contents that it will get on topic at page 23, which the table of contents claims to be the beginning of a section about smallpox. The section I reacted so badly to is probably some kind of artsy introduction.

If I want to read about the environmental impact of the meat industry, and its political machinations in the United States, I'll read a book about that. Ditto for the various other material in this section.

I have a limited emotional budget for downer topics, and do not appreciate someone inserting some important (to them) downer in a book supposedly about something else.

Also, I really don't like the writing style. It feels artsy, cute, and all about feelings. Just what I want for a scientific topic: NOT. But if that had been all, I'd have given it the canonical 100 pages minus my age, or even more, before deciding to abandon it.

This was a recommendation from Storygraph. They seem to be very hit or miss.

>212 ArlieS: Nothing wrong with an early heave-ho. I've done it a few times myself. Most often, that early gut feeling turns out to be correct, so you saved yourself a good bit of aggravation.

>213 ChrisG1: It feels kind of liberating, TBH. And as it happens, I have another book on hand with a similar topic, so I still get to read about it.

115. Sub-majer's challenge by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This is a new book by an author who I binge-reread in 2025, rereading only those I liked the most of his many novels.

Ths sub-series follows a cavalry officer from boyhood to increasingly senior military roles, in the manner of e.g. the Horatio Hornbloweror Honor Harrington series.

This new book probably wouldn't have made the cut for rereading earlier this year. It's got all the right ingredients, so it scratches the right leisure reading itches - but this whole sub-series just isn't quite up to snuff.

I feel rather as if I've read this story before - same fictional country, same military role, similar psionic talents, similar love interest, and similar political obstacles to doing the militarily right thing, that also is presented to the reader as best for the country.

Some details have been changed. This hero's psionic talents are less known officially, and more blatantly used. He had a sexual encounter in the first volume of the sub-series, which returns to him in this book in the form of an illegitimate daughter who wants to get to know her father; I feel sure she'll be an important character in a subsequent volume. He's 3rd generation military, rather than coming from a mage family.

But basically it's much the same, and furthermore the hero seems to be succeeding too easily, with too few casualties.

There are also minor inconsistencies with known facts of the overall series, not easily explained by early events having been mythologized by the time the inconsistent work was set. (The current sub-series is set quite early in the overall time period; the near twin is set quite a lot later in the history of the relevant country. Some of the inconsistencies may turn out to have major plot impacts, if this sub-series is going where I expect, and if the current viewpoint character/hero is the historical character mentioned in the later but similar sub-series.)

Rated 3.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2025
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 23 other books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 438 pages, 3 stars
- read Dec 28-30, 2025; book not previously read

It's the end of 2025 - 4 hrs and 11 minutes to go in my time zone.

I don't expect to finish any more books this year, or even DNF any.

My 2026 thread is here.