Arlie's Reading in 2026

I'm Arlie, a 68 year old retired software engineer, living in Silicon Valley, California, broadly construed. This will be my sixth year of the 75 books challenge. I was born in Canada, but moved to the US in 1992, and to California in 1997.

My reading interests seem fairly broad to me, yet there's an even broader universe of things I probably won't read. So I'm always on the lookout for good recommendations, whether from book bullets, lists, or quasi-intelligent software.

My fiction reading is primarily escapist, and mostly science fiction, fantasy, or, less commonly historical fiction and mystery. I currently pretty much require a happy ending, and an absence of overall doom and gloom. Slices of life showing the bad parts of the human condition are not my thing. I am, however, often OK with considerable violence - I've a long history of reading military fiction and similar - usually sci fi, and less often historical.

When it comes to non-fiction, I'm looking for reliable information. If there are neither footnotes nor bibliography, I won't be reading that book. My subject areas are primarily biology, paleontology, history, technology and economics, but I'll read almost any science topic. I read about bridge (the card game), cooking, politics and other daily life topics without requiring supporting references. I also have an interest in polytheistic theology, but there's so little published that this itch is rarely scratched.

I have limited capacity for books which are major downers. Political books written to produce a nice dose of indignation - and perhaps engagement in the cause - will be DNF'd, as will biology books ostensibly on e.g. trees that overstress endangerment, habitat loss, etc. I want to understand the topic, not have my emotions roused about it. (If I want to learn about a downer topic, I'll pick a single good book, rather than bombarding myself with sermons to the faithful included in other books.)

I'm hoping that this year I'll star lots of threads that regularly hit me with book bullets, not just threads belonging to people I like and enjoy chatting with. About the middle of last year, I found myself very much demotivated to read my starred threads, declared thread bankruptcy several times, and am still overwhelmed and far behind. I'm hoping getting more book bullets will keep me more enthused this year.

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

2025 Statistics: 1

Total Books: 115

Fiction: 60
Non-fiction: 55

First time read: 88
Reread (best guess in some cases): 27

Library books: 109 (9 inter-library loan)
Owned books: 6 (0 recent purchases)

Total Pages: 50,275
Average pages per book: 437

Longest book: 986 pages (The economic government of the world by Martin Daunton)

Did not finish: 7 for cause, plus one abandoned without prejudice (too stressful a read for my energy levels at the time).

2025 Statistics: 2

Fiction Genres:

Fantasy: 30

• cozy fantasy: 1
  
• historical fantasy: 2
  
• other fantasy: 27
  

Alternate history: 1
Historical mystery: 13
Romance: 9
Science Fiction: 6
Science-fiction mystery: 1

Non-Fiction Genres:

Science: 6

• biology: 3
  
• human evolution: 1
  
• paleontology: 2
  
• other science: 1
  

Economics: 10

• economic history: 2
  
• other economics: 8
  

History: 27

• historical theory: 1
  
• history of science: 1
  
• history of technology: 2
  
• other history: 23
  

Demographics: 1
Epistemology: 1
International Relations:1
Politics: 2
Prediction: 1
Punditry: 2
Technology: 2
Technology and culture: 1

2025 Statistics: 2

Copyright Decade:

(to be completed)

2025 Author Statistics

This year, for the first time, each distinct author of anything I read in the year is counted exactly once, whether they were co-author of a single book I read in 2025, or sole author of 24.

Total authors: 81

Author Gender:
Male: 58
Female: 23

Author Nationality (at birth):

Australia: 3
Canada: 5
France: 1
India: 3
Israel: 1
South Korea: 1
Turkey: 1
United Kingdom: 16
United States: 49
West Germany: 1

Author Birth Decade:

1900-1909: 1
1910-1919: 1
1920-1929: 1
1930-1939: 3
1940-1949: 16
1950-1959: 12
1960-1969: 12
1970-1979: 8
1980-1989: 3
1990-1999: 1
unknown: 23

Author Profession:

(to be completed)

Sparse Histogram of Number of Works Read:

24: L.E. Modesitt Jr.
12: Jacqueline Winspear
9: Georgette Heyer
3: Richard J. Evans, John Scalzi
2: Jared T. Rubin
1: everyone else (75 authors)

Books Completed Jan 2026

1. Escape from Rome : the failure of empire and the road to prosperity by Walter Scheidel (history)
2. The geography of risk : epic storms, rising seas, and the costs of America's coasts by Gilbert M. Gaul (US politics)
3. The tomb of dragons by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette) (fantasy)
4. Explorers of deep time : paleontologists and the history of life by Roy E. Plotnick
5. Nicholas Carey by Ronald Welch (juvenile historical fiction, reread)
6. The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease by Charles Kenny (history of disease)
7. Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander by Victoria Goddard (fantasy)
8. The origins of virtue : human instincts and the evolution of cooperation by Matt Ridley (biology, behaviour)
9. Off the Spectrum: Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls by Gina Rippon (health, brain science)
10. Knight Crusader by Ronald Welch (pseudonym of Ronald Oliver Felton) (juvenile historical fiction, reread)

Books Completed Feb 2026

11. The utility of force : the art of war in the modern world by Rupert Smith (non-fiction, military)
12. China marches west: the Qing conquest of Central Eurasia by Peter C. Perdue (non-fiction, history)
13. Automatic noodle by Annalee Newitz (fiction, science fiction)
14. NonZero : the logic of human destiny by Robert Wright (non-fiction, philosophy)
15. Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree (fiction, fantasy)

Books Completed Mar 2026

16. No More Napoleons : how britain managed the threat from europe from waterloo to world war one by Andrew Lambert (history)
17. Excellent sheep : the miseducation of the American elite and the way to a meaningful life by William Deresiewicz (education)
18. Swordheart by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy)
19. Strategy: the logic of war and peace by Edward Luttwak (military science)
20. The fabric of civilization : how textiles made the world by Virginia I. Postrel (technology, history)
21. On the wing : insects, pterosaurs, birds, bats and the evolution of animal flight by David E. Alexander (biology)
22. Killed by a traffic engineer : shattering the delusion that science underlies our transportation system by Wesley E. Marshall (non-fiction)
23. Seapower states : maritime culture, continental empires and the conflict that made the modern world by Andrew Lambert (history)
24. Success and luck : good fortune and the myth of meritocracy by Robert H. Frank (politics)

Books Completed Apr 2026

25. The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman (human evolution)
26. Clockwork boys by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy)
27. Outliers : the story of success by Malcolm Gladwell (popular sociology)
28. France : a modern history from the Revolution to the War with Terror by Jonathan Fenby (history)
29. City of fortune : how Venice ruled the seas by Roger Crowley (history)
30. The wonder engine by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy)
31. Paladin's grace by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy romance)
32. Paladin's strength by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy romance)
33. War and peace and war : the life cycles of imperial nations by Peter Turchin (historical theory)
34. Legalist by L. E. Modesitt Jr. (fantasy)
35. Taming Silicon Valley : how we can ensure that AI works for us by Gary Marcus (politics, digital technology, artificial intelligence)
36. A wizard's guide to defensive baking by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy, juvenile)
37. The pursuit of power : Europe 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans (history)

Books Completed May 2026

38. The relentless revolution : a history of capitalism by Joyce Oldham Appleby (history)
39. Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy romance)
40. Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (fantasy romance)
41. The rise and fall of the great powers : economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 by Paul M. Kennedy (history)
42. Milk : a local and global history by Deborah M. Valenze (history)
43. Reading in the brain : the science and evolution of a human invention by Stanislas Dehaene (neurology)
44. Pied Piper by Nevil Shute (fiction, reread)
45. Good reasonable people : the psychology behind America's dangerous divide by Keith Payne (psychology)
46. The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World by Hal Brands (history, geopolitics)
47. A splendid exchange : how trade shaped the world by William J. Bernstein (history)

Books Completed Jun 2026

48. Round the Bend by Nevil Shute (fiction, reread)
49. The price of victory : a naval history of Britain, 1815-1945 by N. A. M. Rodger (history)
50. Secular cycles by Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov
51. Platform Decay by Martha Wells (fiction)

Books Completed Jul 2026

52. Behind the throne by K. B. Wagers (science fiction)
53. After the crown by K. B. Wagers (science fiction)
54. Beyond the empire by K. B. Wagers (science fiction)

Books Completed Aug 2026

Books Completed Sep 2026

Books Completed Oct 2026

Books Completed Nov 2026

Books Completed Dec 2026

Books Pearl Ruled in 2026

1. The red knight by Miles Cameron (fiction)
2. Maverick military leaders : the extraordinary battles of Washington, Nelson, Patton, Rommel, and others by Robert Harvey (military history)
3. The soul thief by Cecelia Holland (fiction)
4. Anti-Piketty : capital for the 21st century edited by Jean-Philippe Delsol, Nicholas Lecaussin, and Emmanuel Martin (economics)

Abandoned without Prejudice in 2026

Thread opened for business.

Come on in.

Welcome back for another year, Arlie

Happy new thread, Arlie!

>23 ArlieS: Merry new thread!

Nicely set up for another year, Arlie. I'll be along as often as I can manage as always. xx

You had me at "If there are neither footnotes or bibliography, I won't be reading that book." Starred.

>24 drneutron: >25 quondame: >26 richardderus: >27 PaulCranswick:

Good to see all of you for another year. Susan (quondame), I don't see your thread yet.

> 28 Welcome aboard

I've now made multiple edits to my starting post, correcting typos. I'm not an illiterate boob, but I can sure play one on TV.

>29 ArlieS: I’ll show up with the new year.

Starred! : )

Happy New Year. I hope 2026 is a good year for you. Happy endings are good and needed right now.

New Year greetings from Kuala Lumpur. My project is at least physically completed and an addition to the city scape.

Look forward to keeping up with you in 2026, Arlie.

>33 BLBera: >34 PaulCranswick: Happy new year to you both.

I've started posting my 2025 reading statistics (above), and promptly discovered at least one bug in my spreadsheet. I'll continue that after hunting down the reasons for the two errors I've found so far, and spot checking for other nonsense results.

And good luck fixing your nonsense results, LOL. I'm in the same boat.

>37 Berly: Thank you, and same to you.

So far I've found and fixed one outright bug, and one data entry mistake (typo). If I'm really lucky, the rest of my results are good. (I can hope....)

Happy New Year, Arlie!

It's the day after New Years, and the 75 books challenge is so busy it's likely to interfere with reading real books.

I've followed my plan and checked every single new thread in the group, starring any that look like they might be a source of relevant book bullets, usually without saying "hi" to the poster. This is far too many to keep up with, and I expect to have dropped at least half of them by the end of the month, as I find they either aren't reading books I'm interested in, or aren't posting enough about what they are reading to provide an attractive bullet. I also expect to be hopelessly behind on all the threads I haven't dropped. OTOH, I'll try to continue to check new threads as they are created.

Next week is going to be mostly devoted to a bridge competition. I expect to be utterly exhausted, and accomplish almost no reading. My bridge partner and I made the perhaps barmy decision to drive there each day we play, rather than staying in the hotel, making our days even longer, but sparing our budgets. The last time we did this, I caught some random bug, and spent the immediately following week sick; this time, I hope to up my masking game and avoid that fate.

I currently have 12 library books not yet finished. Currently reading:

- China Marches West
- The Tomb of Dragons
- Escape from Rome
- Explorers of Deep Time
- The Geography of Risk
- The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease

Two of these might be finished before the bridge tournament eats my time.

>40 ArlieS: Looks like a good batch of books! The one on Qing expansion looks interesting - will keep an eye out for your thoughts.

>40 ArlieS: I'd not seen you were a bridge player before. I only play on BridgeBase, as I literally don't know anyone who plays. My parents did & taught me & then I picked it up when BB came along. It seems like Covid destroyed a lot of the live play and clubs.

>41 drneutron: It's been pretty interesting so far.

>42 ChrisG1: As it happens, I was playing on Bridgebase earlier this evening. Our local club only has one evening game per week - I think it had more before covid - so we play at the club that evening, and online on Friday. (It does have daytime games as well - they aren't down to just one game per week.)

Hi Arlie! Happy New Year and happy first thread of 2026.

>1 ArlieS: Although my escape genre is different than yours, I 100% agree with I currently pretty much require a happy ending, and an absence of overall doom and gloom. My nonfiction requirements are similar to yours, too.

I found myself very much demotivated to read my starred threads, declared thread bankruptcy several times, and am still overwhelmed and far behind. Are we twins with different mothers?

>44 karenmarie: Maybe we are.

1. Escape from Rome : the failure of empire and the road to prosperity by Walter Scheidel

This is a history book, or perhaps an economic history book, with a bit of a twist - it's goal is to demonstrate how and why Europe became the setting for the Industrial Revolution, and the escape from Smithian/Malthusian to Schumpeterian economic progress. I.e. the change from small improvements leading to population increase, and a return to prior average prosperity, to sky-is-the-limit innovation-driven improvement.

Unfortunately, the author appears to be so sure of The Truth (TM) about what enabled this transition that he feels no need to provide evidence for that detail. He just feels the need to show that the relevant conditions applied when and where the Industrial Revolution began and not elsewhere, and explore what-ifs about how likely/unlikely things were to go this way.

It should perhaps be read in conjunction with Ian Morris' War! What is it good for? : conflict and the progress of civilization from primates to robots which I completed in November 2025. Both authors take for granted certain processes self-evident to them, and focus on showing how and where they worked. Neither establishes actual causation, or even attempts to do so. And the real kicker: Morris "knows" that the bigger the political unit, the less the chance of people dying by violence. To him, empires are good, even when imposed by force. Meanwhile Scheidel "knows" that empires prevent innovation - competing states are good, particularly if they remain balanced, rather than one becoming hegemonic. To him, empires are bad.

Both are obviously trying to explain, or perhaps glorify Western/European history, with Morris proceeding from there to explain/glorify US hegemony. Both have self-evident (sic) axioms to support their conclusions. Both appear to be economic in their orientation. Both favor the same cultural areas, which they just happen to belong to. But their explanations are diametrically opposed.

Other than this rather major problem, Escape from Rome is an interesting book, with lots of interesting historical information. Much of the detail about China and India was not previously known to me. It's worth a read. The bibliography was large, and I mined it for future reading. But as is all too common, the author is better at rationalizing (finding evidence for what he already believes) than thinking rationally or critically.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2019
- Author (Walter Scheidel): male, Austrian, born 1973, historian, author previously read (2022)
- English, inter-library loan, 670 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Dec 7, 2025-Jan 3, 2026, book not previously read

This book got onto my TBR because of a reference in Pox Romana by Colin Elliot.

Hello, Arlie, and happy 2026! I will try to follow you this year, whether you follow my thread or not. It's probably going to be a while before I get back into science fiction, but I am interested in your comments on nonfiction books.

>47 atozgrl: Welcome aboard. I have your thread starred, but I'm already falling behind on everyone's threads.

>48 ArlieS: So am I!

2. The geography of risk : epic storms, rising seas, and the costs of America's coasts by Gilbert M. Gaul

This is a book about how US politics encourages relatively wealthy people to buy homes in flood plains, rebuilding them at tax payer expense each time they are destroyed or damaged by flooding. Tax payers - rarely local ones - also get to pay for defensive measures - many of which barely qualify for stop gaps.

Such books are not uncommon. The system as it currently operates does two things. (1) It encourages risky behaviour by privatizing profit while socializing risk, in this case via a combination of subsidized flood insurance and various emergency funds. (2) It makes it easy to rebuild in place, with perhaps some mitigation measures - and hellishly difficult to rebuild somewhere less likely to flood again and again - in spite of a few provisions intended to accomplish the opposite.

Town governments want their local taxpayers returning, not rebuilding somewhere else. State governments want the federal government to help with their latest photogenic disaster. Contractors want to build, ideally the bigger and more expensive the better. And it's rare that all the local infrastructure is destroyed - moving would require rebuilding all of it elsewhere.

This book focuses on New Jersey, and to a lesser extent Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and perhaps goes back into the political history a bit farther than most, but isn't otherwise special within its genre. There's an interesting story of the motives and experience of a particular builder, starting before the Depression, which humanizes things, but of course he's only one of many examples - a lucky as well as smart one, since he made rather a lot of money.

It's entirely about the United States (not "America" or even "North America"), except to the extent that engineers from the Netherlands appear as consultants.

Overall, I found the book OK but not great. There's probably a better one somewhere, but other books on this general topic I've read so far have also been merely OK.

To the book's credit - it's not written to rouse indignation and similar. It's possible to get indignant, given the data, seeing folks already quite well off once again privatizing profit while socializing risk.

But the author isn't trying to play with the reader's emotions. If anything, he's trying to show how everyone involved has been trying to do what seems best - but from their individual viewpoints. Of course a small town mayor of a prosperous but waterlogged town will call in every possible political favor to get help from higher levels of government - but the help they'll want will be in flood defenses and/or rebuilding, not e.g. imposed zoning preventing particularly high risk construction. Of course people with money will want beautiful ocean views - in a house otherwise built with the size and amenities to which they are accustomed. Etc. etc. There are no villains here.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, US politics and climate change, series: n/a, 2019
- Author (Gilbert M. Gaul): male, American, born 1951, journalist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 286 pages, 3 stars
- read Dec 21, 2025-Jan 5, 2026, book not previously read

This book got onto my TBR from LibraryThing's new recommendation system, books from all times, where it was mistagged as "plague". (That clearly was not the topic, just from the sub-title, so I must have decided it sounded interesting anyway, even though it wasn't about diseases.)

>50 ArlieS: That looks to be an interesting, though pretty specialized read, Arlie.

>51 PaulCranswick: I'm interested in this sort of thing because I want to have a somewhat better idea of the probable local-to-me impacts of climate change, including economic impacts. I'm absolutely not right on the coast, but in a world of people as farseeing as I try to be, I'd expect the value of my house to already be static or falling, just because I'm in a coastal urban area, which doubtless has infrastructure at risk. (So we'll predictably get either an increased tax bite, or degraded services, or both. Probably not this decade, mind you, or even the next.) Instead, housing prices here keep climbing.

3. The tomb of dragons by Katherine Addison (pseudonym of Sarah Monette)

This fantasy novel is the first book I both started and completed in 2026. There will be more, as well as more books started in 2025 and finished in 2026.

I'd happily read all 3 books of this series that existed in 2022, so once this one came out in 2025 it was only a matter of time before I read it.

It did not disappoint. There's not much more I can say without spoilers, but it was true to the rest of the series, even while characters developed and their situations changed.

If you liked the other books in The Goblin Emperor, you'll probably like this one too.

Statistics:
- Fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2025
- Author (Katherine Addison aka Sarah Monette): American, born 1974, novelist, author previously read (2022)
- English, public library, 342 pages, 4 stars
- read Jan 1-7, 2026; book not previously read

This book was recommended by LibraryThing's classic recommendation system, thereby making me aware of its existence. Having happily read 3 prior books in the series back in 2022, I merely needed to know a new volume had come out in 2025, and was available through my local library system - no need for any additional recommendation.

>53 ArlieS: I did like The Tomb of Dragons and the others in that world.

>52 ArlieS: Global warming and ageing populations are going to place an increasing burden upon us all in coming years, Arlie. Can we sustain the population with finite food stocks especially when we seem to be reducing the land given over to farming/agriculture for the purposes of alternative energy production (earth/wind)? How can we tackle the issue of rising sea levels and coastal erosion? How can an ever smaller working population continue to support and ever smaller dependent population?

Big questions and not an abundance of easy or at least palatable answers.

4. Explorers of deep time : paleontologists and the history of life by Roy E. Plotnick

This is a book about paleontologists and their work. It's about paleontology as a field, but not about paleontology specifics. This isn't my usual fare, though many books ostensibly about a science say an awful lot about the people doing it. Indeed, the first part of the book just read like one of those, only a bit more so.

I liked it, but didn't love it. It also left me convinced that I didn't want to be any kind of academic in the United States, not even in a scientific field. (And probably not anywhere else either.)

It's worth reading if you want to know more about how paleontology is practiced, and what sort of jobs paleontologists can expect to get. (Notably I hadn't realized that museum curator and similar are as prestigious and often as research oriented as professor and similar.)

Statistics:
- non-fiction, paleontology and paleontologists, series: n/a, 2022
- Author (Roy E. Plotnick): male, probably American, age unknown (emeritus), academic (paleontology/earth sciences), author not previously read
- English, public library, 334 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Dec 23, 2025-Jan 12, 2026, book not previously read

This book was recommended to me by Storygraph.

5. Nicholas Carey by Ronald Welch (pseudonym of Ronald Oliver Felton)

This is a historical novel aimed at (mostly male) school children, part of a series (Carey Family Chronicles) that I loved as a child, and still appreciate as an adult. I've been collecting this author's children's fiction ever since, when I happened to find books I didn't yet have. This was one of the few I didn't have yet, when Abe Books notified me late last year that they had it available.

I almost certainly read this books as a child, borrowing it from either the school library or the local public library. Most likely I read it several times. But I had essentially no memory of it when it arrived last week.

The series follows the fortunes of various members of an imaginary noble family, based in the Welsh Marches. The protagonist is always a young man or boy. He invariably becomes involved in significant historical events, generally of a military nature. Often he takes the place of someone who really existed, for one or more small interesting episodes.

When this novel begins, Nicholas Carey is a British officer, brought up to privilege and money, a nephew of the current earl. He spends a lot of time on leave, avoiding his military duties. The book starts in 1853, with him holidaying in Italy - then mostly ruled by Austria. It ends in 1855, during the Crimean War.

He starts that war as an also-ran officer, but develops a sense of duty in the course of it.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction, juvenile, series (not first), 1963
- Author (Ronald Welch aka Ronald Oliver Felton): British, born 1974, headmaster and novelist, author previously read
- English, recent purchase, 212 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Jan 9-13, 2026; book previously read

I reread this book because it had just arrived. I enjoyed it so much I may well start a reread of the rest of my collection of Welch's books.

6. The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease by Charles Kenny

This is a book about the history of infectious diseases, and in particular human reactions to them - methods of coping that may or may not have worked. The author's background is in economics, and he tends towards a narrative of ongoing improvement, with a virtuous circle involving prosperity and knowledge.

I learned a few things I hadn't encountered before, but not much, and rated it overall as good but not great.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history of disease, series: n/a, 2021
- Author (Charles Kenny): male, probably American, age unknown, economist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 304 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Jan 1-13, 2026, book not previously read

This book was suggested by the LibraryThing new recommendation system, when I looked for books not necc. recent and tagged "plague".

>56 ArlieS: & >58 ArlieS: Some pretty serious reading over here, Arlie.

>59 PaulCranswick: I love learning.

>60 ArlieS: As do I, Arlie. My post was intended to be a laudatory one. xx

>61 PaulCranswick: We have many things in common.

How did I miss noticing the Big Fat Books Challenge in past years? (Is it new this year?) I can now be found there as well as here. Because once you can't keep up on all the threads, you might as well add more. :-)

7. Portrait of a Wide Seas Islander by Victoria Goddard

This little book shows Kip Mdang, of The hands of the emperor : a novel of the nine worlds from the viewpoint of his aging teacher, who hopes that Kip will be his successor. It's a short book, covering a shorter period of time. It's about the teacher's experience, but we see him interacting with Kip and other important characters from the earlier book, particularly in the latter half of this book.

The author does a good job of not simply rehashing parts of the previous book - the characters have their own viewpoint, and their own interactions. And it's got that lovely Victoria Goddard writing style. I enjoyed it a lot; too bad it was so short - though I don't see how this story could have been told in longer form.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2022
- Author (Victoria Goddard): female, Canadian, age unknown, writer (literary fantasy), author read in 2025
- English, inter-library loan, 97 pages, 4 stars
- read Jan 16-19, 2026; book not previously read

I read this book because I enjoyed the author's The hands of the emperor : a novel of the nine worlds

>64 ArlieS: I enjoy so many rereads of Victoria Goddard that I didn’t clock the virtues of the offering of different material, but that’s very accurate. Her different POV’s are different.

8. The origins of virtue : human instincts and the evolution of cooperation by Matt Ridley

This book attempts a nuanced balance between selfishness and groupishness as built into our genes - groupishness being more relevant/accurate than altruism. I found it hard to grasp, as I'm very much subject to human perceptual distortions such as black and white thinking - I tend to see individuals and even whole categories of people as either good and honorable or selfish abusive bastards, not varying between the two depending on situational context. I know better than that, intellectually, but my emotions have their own Truths (sic), no more fact-based or accurate than most Truths of that kind.

The book is good about pretty much all the things that are commonly botched in science books written for lay people, particularly those written by science writers and journalists. My one caveat is that it was published in 1997 - 29 years ago - and the science has been progressing in the mean time, so it's not up to date, and there will be both missing pieces and plausible-at-the-time theories that have since been refuted.

Read it if you are interested in the topic.

I should possibly reread it 2 or 3 times, to try to reduce my very human tendency to black and white thinking in this area.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, biology, series: n/a, 1997
- Author (Matt Ridley): male, British, born 1958, science writer, author previously read (2016)
- English, public library, 295 pages, 4 stars
- read Jan 9-20, 2026, book not previously read

I added this book to my TBR because of a reference in Ian Morris' War! What is it Good For?

>66 ArlieS: Can we support and promote privacy and community at the same time? I would argue that it is possible Arlie, but that the interface can get blurred.

>67 PaulCranswick: I'm in favor of both, at least for some values of both terms. But whether or not the combination seems possible to me tends to depend on my mood.

9. Off the Spectrum: Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls by Gina Rippon

This is a book about people on the autistic spectrum, particularly female people, and brain imaging research about them. It has a bit of an axe to grind, about definitions of autism that tended to exclude females, and research performed only on males but presumed to represent females equally.

It's probably a reasonable critique, but of course it's rather definitional - is there one "autistic spectrum disorder", with a variety of symptoms, or are there several? If there are several, it's pretty clear they are related - siblings and especially twins of those diagnosed with one of them are more likely to have any of them.

But we could in principle distinguish non-verbal head-bangers, social-avoidant/incompetent stereotypical geeks/little professors, and social-seeking, self-masking "shy" kids/adults with poor social skills, and call this three syndromes rather than one. Indeed, earlier editions of the DSM, distinguished the first two (one was "autism" and the other was "Asperger's syndrome", while having no name for the third one.

Leaving this aside, the gold standard diagnostic criteria for autism tend to exclude the self-masking "shy" kids/adults with poor social skills, who tend to be female, which naturally leads to their omission from high quality studies. It also leads to worse services for those people and their families, and a whole slew of incorrect diagnoses resulting in ineffective treatment.

But this is not my axe. I am a female who presents like a social-avoidant/incompetent stereotypical geek. I was never diagnosed, being too old for most teachers and therapists to have heard of Asperger's syndrome when I was young and acting out. And as a young adult (teen?) I developed self-masking skills; any female with poor social understanding can act quiet and shy, routinely wait for someone else to act first (so they know what to do), and be seen as normal, healthy, etc. (Males OTOH get flak for such passivity, and possibly diagnoses.) My own probable autism became evident only when my niblings started accumulating diagnoses.

Reading parts of this book were very hard. Masking was something I did to avoid people treating me in ways that felt to me as abusive. Reading about other maskers, and the predictable psychological difficulties masking creates took me back to periods when I needed to pretend to be a "worthwhile human being" (sic) in order to e.g. keep a job. I remember figuring out how to build "positive relationships" (sic) with people I believed would hate me if they actually knew me, providing them with a mirror on which to project their stereotypes, pretending to enjoy things they believed to be "fun", etc. etc. I remembered being the tolerated low status hanger on, butt when anyone wanted one, etc. Not fun to remember this. I'm glad I mostly don't have to deal with it any more.

Note by the way that contrary to the assertions of this author about most/all autistics who mask, I didn't do it because I wanted to be part of their group. I just wanted them to refrain from bullying me, or otherwise excluding me from things I wanted or needed to do. And whenever possible, I used any other technique in my repertoire to avoid or redirect such situations. I still do.

The really fascinating part of this book, to me, wasn't anything about masking, let alone about gender differences. It was learning about what we now know about the differences between autistic and non-autistic brain development, even in infants too young for diagnosis. (The trick to find pre-autistics is to study family members of diagnosed autistics, who are statistically much more likely than random infants to develop the syndrome. And you compare them with their non-autistic siblings, for a near perfect control group, particularly as it's also blind - you don't know which ones will turn out to be autistic when brain imaging infants.)

The genetics was also fascinating. We don't know what genes are involved in autism, but we do know that it runs in families. Indeed, we've known that for decades. But now we can make statistical predictions like "what % of female (fraternal) twins of male autistics will be diagnosed"? (That's different from male fraternal twins of male autistics, which is different again from male identical twins of male autistics....) I hadn't realized such detail had been gathered, and was available enough to be casually cited.

This book worked well for me to update my 10-20 years out of date knowledge of the scientific understanding of autistic spectrum disorder. I'd have preferred a book a bit less triggery, and a bit less focussed on "where are the girls/women", but it did the job.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, autistic spectrum disorder, series: n/a, 2025
- Author (Gina Rippon): female, British, born 1950, academic (cognitive neuroimaging), author not previously read
- English, public library, 338 pages, 4 stars
- read Jan 14-24, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because my housemate noticed it on the new books shelf at the local library, and figured I might be interested. She's got a rather better track record, as it happens, than any recommendation service I've used. But of course she knows more about me than what books I've read.

Pearl Rule 1. The red knight by Miles Cameron

This fantasy novel does some things very right, making it easy to open at a random page and read enjoyably. It does others in ways not at all to my tastes.

Problem 1 - gratuitous evil/sadism, beyond the point of setting up an over-the-top antagonist, with the lucky reader getting too much of a look into the victims' experience.

Problem 2 - more viewpoint characters than I can count or remember, some of them seeming quite interesting but showing up only for a handful of pages, just to give someone's view of yet another character. As of page 114 (of 665), I still haven't identified the title character (aka "the Red Knight").

I'm especially sorry to abandon a book that would have qualified for the Big Books group. But it's neither providing pleasant escapism nor even providing a challenging fictionalized look at real life.

This book was recommended to me by Storygraph, which is exceedingly hit or miss.

>69 ArlieS: & >70 ArlieS:

The one that looked the biggest challenge was the one that you read and enjoyed!

>71 PaulCranswick: Books can be so surprising.

I've been busier than a one-armed paper hanger for the last week or two, investigating linux distros and then finally installing one. I had purchased a pre-installed Pop!_OS 22.04 linux system around two years ago, and not been happy with it. So it got little use, in spite of my original plan being to make it my primary computer, with my Mac kept to do only the things that only MacOS or Windows could do. Meanwhile, each update to my Mac made it worse than it had been before. Their Sequoia release was very bad for me, and I'm told the next year's release (Tahoe?) is even worse. So I wanted off of MacOS very badly. But oh dear, I didn't want to deal with yet another new OS, that I feared would be as unstable and aggravating as Pop!_OS 22.04.

Two days ago I installed Kubuntu 25.10 on the (previously) Pop!_OS system. I'm still dealing with all the usual aggravations of a new release, including various apps that stopped working because they didn't like something about the new environment. (Linux and Windows aren't supposed to do that, but it sometimes happens anyway, whereas MacOS regularly obsoletes things users would prefer to keep.)

It is, however, already more functional and less annoying than the Pop!_OS system ever became. The KDE desktop seems to have been written by people who think like me; their choices often make sense to me, rather than just having to be searched online and memorized. All my files have been restored, and my bookkeeping program (my main use of the Pop!_OS box) is working fine. I know approximately what to do to get my retro dos games working again using the latest version of dosbox, rather than the ancient version they were packaged with, which no longer functions. I've reported the bizarre failures of B-Folders 5 to its vendor, and hope they'll find the problem; meanwhile, I have a temporary workaround, and a long term migration plan. Just about everything else is working fine, except that I haven't yet tried it all.

My reading is way down, and my presence here has been much more an absence. This will probably continue for a while, as I get into the tinkering-with-new-goodies stage, taking advantage of features in the new system. But I feel like I've turned a corner. Maybe I'll soon be spending a lot less time snarling at "the idiot who designed this stupid feature", "the moron who designed this UI", and "the goat molesting manager who clearly failed to budget for testing, and/or hired morons as testers and failed to train or supervise them".

The computer setup binge continues. Too bad I can't count all the documentation I've been reading as one or more books :-)

p.s. The B-Folders 5 vendor got back to me with a work around. That tool has got a new lease on life.

>74 ArlieS: I hope the computer setup binge ends soon, Arlie!

>75 alcottacre: I keep thinking it's about done, except for a couple of small projects. But every time I use the new comp set up, I think of something else that might be useful.

This morning I sat down with a book, and read about 10 pages before I had a brainstorm about ways to work around a problem I'd discovered last night. Naturally, the first two methods I tried didn't work, and I wound up using a third one. It took more than an hour before I went back to the book. No More Napoleons: How Britain managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One by Andrew Lambert - an interesting chunkster, covering a period I thought I knew something about, but teaching me a lot in the process.

I have managed to finish two books since all this fun started, but not yet report them. I don't think that will happen today either. (A) I'd rather be reading and (B) I was just reminded that I need to move my book tracking spreadsheets to linux. One should transfer nicely as a CSV, but the other has formulae that will have to be recreated in whatever new spreadsheet program I move to. (Apple's Numbers won't be available on linux.)

It's going to be a nice setup when I'm done. But there's so much more still to do.

10. Knight Crusader by Ronald Welch (pseudonym of Ronald Oliver Felton)

This children's historical novel is an old friend. I'm currently short on new fiction, so decided to reread some old friends. This is one of them.

This book tells the story of a young man, grandson of a participant in the First Crusade, born in Outremer and coming of age just about in time for the setbacks and loss of territory that led to the Third Crusade. As with all the stories in this series, he experiences various critical bits of history, including some events that actually happened, but to someone else. (In this case, his name is borrowed from a real knight, who died in Jerusalem.) Our protagonist survives the Third Crusade, but leaves Outremer, returning to Wales, where his grandfather had been born.

It wasn't as successful reread as I expected; probably I'd reread it too recently, or perhaps I'm finally, at the age of 68, growing out of boys' adventure stories. Still, it was enjoyable, and I recommend this series for all the boys in your life.

Statistics:
- Fiction, historical fiction, juvenile, series (not first), 1954
- Author (Ronald Welch aka Ronald Oliver Felton): British, born 1974, headmaster and novelist, author of my #5 for 2026
- English, own shelves, 272 pages, 3 stars
- read Jan 27-31, 2026; book previously read

>77 ArlieS: While I have no doubt I've grown out of boys adventure stories, this was absolutely my thing in my early teens. I went through my high-schools large accumulation of books that must have been dumped from someone's grandfather's childhood collection, that featured young lost heirs to in ancient Rome. There seemed to be dozens, but I haven't found any clues to author or even exact source in time. But tales of Knights - The Talisman, Men of Iron, Days of Chivalry were gobbled up and remembered.

>76 ArlieS: I have that one on the shelves, Arlie and must get to it soon.

>70 ArlieS: Oh crap, I hate that experience more than reading a really bad book. Sorry that happened, Arlie.

>77 ArlieS: Comfort reading! A much-needed break from frustrating reality. Glad to see it, and hope it helps all the transitional woes.

>78 quondame: >79 PaulCranswick: >80 richardderus: *waves* Good to "see" you all.

>78 quondame: Libraries are wonderful things, sometimes even school libraries. I love it when they have unsuual material.

>79 PaulCranswick: Post reference got messed up. Knight Crusader?

>81 richardderus: Comfort reading continues to loom important in my life.

11. The utility of force : the art of war in the modern world by Rupert Smith

This is a book about modern militaries and the problems they encounter dealing with situations they weren't designed for - which are most of the ones they face. In particular, it's about finding solutions to those problems, or at least trying to do so. The author is a retired British general, so has experienced a loot of this personally.

The basic thesis is that most/all nations' militaries are designed to fight and hopefully win what the author refers to as industrial war: all-out, ultimately attritional conflicts between nation states, such as world wars I and II. What they end up doing is some mix of peace-keeping, being deployed as a political statement but not expected to act, counter-insurgency warfare, and similar. They are often in multi-national forces, with only limited control or even communications with their allies, who don't share all the same goals.

They often find themselves in a position where their core competence - killing opponents in job lots - is useless or more likely counterproductive. But they aren't equipped or trained for killing opponents selectively, without collateral damage.

Their other big problem is that no one wants a completely military solution. Their political masters want to use their presence, or some successful mission, to aid them in negotiating a solution. They rarely want territory conquered or anything similar.

Net result: a tendency to win all their battles, but lose the war.

And then there are the constraints on not using up hard to replace soldiers and equipment. There's no conscription, and limited budget for upgrading equipment with the times, never mind replacing it when broken.

The author attempts to both show the problem and advance solutions, drawing partly from general history and partly from his own experiences. He does a pretty good job of describing (some of?) the problems, and doing so intelligibly to people not steeped in military culture. But his proposed solutions are hard for this lay person to understand, and I can't figure out whether it's wooly thinking, or assuming the reader knows things learned only in military academies.

After much waffling, I allowed this flaw to talk me down from a rating of 4 to 3.5, even though the book taught me a lot, and was fairly unique in my experience. (Not e.g. yet another book about horses and the Silk Road, all coming out at nearly the same time.)

Statistics:
- non-fiction, military science, series: n/a, 2007
- Author (Rupert Smith): male, British, born 1943, military (general), author not previously read
- English, public library, 430 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Jan 22-Feb 4, 2026, book not previously read

I added this book to my TBR as a result of a reference in Ian Morris' War! What is it good for?

The computer switch continues to eat my life. Today was supposed to be an off day, devoted to such things as catching up on bookkeeping and email, but I'd already transferred one spreadsheet before I got properly started drinking coffee. (It's rarely used, and I'd forgotten about it when listing which ones needed to move. But in looking at my calendar, I saw reason to update that spreadsheet - contacts essentially obsolete, but kept in case I need to recognize their name some time in future. (Stupid contacts program doesn't have the ability to declare specific contacts "archived" or similar, and not show them unless specifically requested. So I was e.g. getting birthday announcements for people not seen in decades, or, in some cases, known to be deceased.)

I no sooner got partway into moving that spreadsheet - blessedly easy, since it's only one sheet and uses no formulae, so could transfer as a single CSV - when I got an email from Google telling me I'd used 70% of my free space, and would I like to pay $ per month to increase it. That linked to a frightfully bad page for finding and deleting objects, with repeated interruptions suggesting I pay for more storage instead. So I went to their ordinary use photos and email pages, and used their less bad interfaces to wipe out any fat accumulated since the last time this happened. (This would be all emails, as well as some photos - the forward-to-protonmail I have set up doesn't delete the mail it forwards; they are instead left behind for manual deletion.)

After that I sat down with a book, and then walked to the library to get the book on hold for me which had also appeared in my morning's email.

Slow progress, but I hope today to at least record one of the two more books I've completed reading. But I'm afraid both reading and recording my own reads are getting priority over reading other people's threads. I see a massive thread bankruptcy in my future, starting over from a baseline of whenever the new computer setup stops eating my life.

Who knew a full and complete transfer could take so long, if the user demands the best possible environment on the new system, not just whatever the defaults offer?

OTOH, I *may* have found myself a volunteer project. I like the people on the LibreOffice forums. They could maybe use someone to help keep their documentation a bit more up to date. I intend to start with a wiki page of tips for users coming to LibreOfice Calc from MacOS' Numbers, and see how things go from there.

12. China marches west: the Qing conquest of Central Eurasia by Peter C. Perdue

This is an excellent history of China and Russia sharing out the lands between them, with emphasis primarily on China, secondarily on the proto-states and other peoples absorbed. I learned a lot about a time and place I only knew from books about steppe nomads, and then not very well. (The best steppe nomad stories are earlier.)

Quoting the book's Introduction: "From the seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, three great empires - the Manchu Qing (1644-1911), the Muscovite-Russian(1613-1917), and the Mongolian Zunghars (1670-1760) - contended for power in the heart of Eurasia."

This is the story of that conflict, which ended with the Zunghar eliminated, and the Chinese and Russians dividing the territory between them. This includes Tibet. All this territory is now claimed as properly theirs by the Chinese State.

The Manchu were a steppe dynasty themselves, with better understanding of conditions in the lands they sought to conquer. They were also quite expansionist, having started by conquering the whole of China. So Central Asia beckoned.

This book goes into depth and detail not usually found in English, or so it claims. (I hadn't previously read anything about the topic, so I can't really say.) I found it both interesting and informative. I especially appreciated details of administering and attempting to assimilate the new lands and people.

If you have any interest, and a taste for Big Fat Books, you should consider reading this one.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2005
- Author (Peter C. Perdue): male, american, born 1949, academic historian, author not previously read
- English, public library, 725 pages, 4 stars
- read Dec 28, 2025-Feb 14, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book as a result of noticing a reference to it in Ian Morris' War! What is it good for?

13. Automatic noodle by Annalee Newitz

This is a cozy novella about oppressed people (robots in this case) with post-war trauma finding new life and chosen family, while skirting oppressive laws, not to mention seriously inept would-be persecutors.

It's a decent read, but like Babel: or the necessity of violence by R. F. Kuang, which I read last year, its ideology is showing. It's clearly really about modern oppression, and postulates the kind of easy accommodation (aka living in the cracks) available primarily to invisible minorities.

Fortunately its ideology merely struck me as facile and overly optimistic, unlike my reaction to the ideology of the other book. So it only nagged at me a little, rather than interfering with my enjoyment of the book.

It does, however, feel shallow enough in its handling of trauma and similar, to fit in among old fashioned children's books. (It's *not* however addressed to children.)

So, a good little read, if you want something cozy and are prepared not to take it seriously. But the preponderance of robot characters is not the only reason it doesn't feel like it's about the real world. (As well as the wimpy opposition and not-so-traumatic trauma, California's successful War of Liberation in the backstory just screams of wish fulfillment.)

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, non-series, 2025
- Author (Annalee Newitz): female, American, born in 1969, journalist, editor, and author, author not previously read
- English, public library, 163 pages, 4 stars
- read Feb 15-18, 2026; book not previously read

>86 ArlieS: I wish I understood why I bounce off Newitz's writing and her stories. I thoroughly enjoy her spouses Charlie Jane Anders' work...and am tooth-grittingly irked by 5% into one of hers; they till very similar fields so it is extra weird.

I'm super-impressed by your volunteering plan! It's one of those "it makes everyone else's experience better" enhancements that I often wish "Someone" would do. I never seem to realize I, too, am or can be "Someome."

>87 richardderus: You do your bit with the book reviews. They are solid, with enough for a reader to make a good decision about whether the book would work for them.

>88 ArlieS: Arlie! You bring the blush to my witherèd cheek. Very kindly said.

My "fun" with computers is continuing. Two weeks or so ago, the disk I use to backup the Mac died. Two days ago, the Mac informed me it was having problems doing backups.

Naturally I wasn't ready to completely cut over to the Linux system, so the Mac backup drive had to be replaced. I bought 2 external drives; the other one is for the linux system, once I figure out the mysteries of linux backup software; I doubt they have anything that works quite as smoothly as Apple's Time Machine.

In linux progress, I'm getting a lot more comfortable with LibreOffice's Calc. I built two spreadsheets in the course of the backup crisis, and did them both with Calc rather than Numbers. I have two spreadsheets fully converted - one on the Linux system; the other created on the Mac with LibreOffice's Mac version. Plenty more to go - I'd have been doing that the day I discovered the backup problem, if I didn't find myself fully occupied with housework and bookkeeping, both of which are now overdue.

I also managed to finish two more books - duly noted in what's now a LibreOffice spreadsheet. I'll get them posted real-soon-now, but probably not today, as now that the Mac is running its first backup to the new disk, my top priority is to deal with mail and bookkeeping. Even the disk purchase hasn't made it into GnuCash yet, and I see a credit card bill peeking out of the mail stack.

Time machine predicts that the initial full backup will take it 7 hours. That's for close to 2 TB of files. Incremental backups will be a lot faster, as most of those files rarely or never change. I didn't pay extra for a speedy disk with a speedy connection - there's really no point when the disk is used for backups. (That's also why I bought hard disks, not SSDs - SSDs cost about 3 times as much per terabyte, and their only advantage for backups is that they are somewhat less fragile - just in case you plan to drop kick your backup drive.)

Fortunately I do my bookkeeping on the linux system, since the Mac may be kind of slow until this enormous first back up finishes. Or then again, it may not - it had been slowing down a lot during backups recently, but that might have been a side effect of the failing disk. (I don't remember if it slowed the whole system when I first started using it.)

>76 ArlieS: I am curious as to how No More Napoleons is going, Arlie? It sounds interesting to me and wanted your thoughts on it. I understand the ongoing computer problems are consuming your life right now so I do not want to put undue pressure on you to finish the book :) In the meantime, several of your other reads bear tracking down. . .

>91 alcottacre: It's very good. I'm a bit more than 2/3 of the way through, and expect it to be the next one I finish. (Good thing too; I only have 17 more days before the library wants it back.)

>92 ArlieS: Dadgum those libraries, always wanting their books back! I am glad to hear that the book is good. I will have to track down a copy. I already found out that my local library does not have it.

Pearl Rule 2. Maverick military leaders : the extraordinary battles of Washington, Nelson, Patton, Rommel, and others by Robert Harvey

I picked up this book in the library stacks, where I saw it on the same shelf where I was collecting a book from my TBR list. A quick skim told me it was a collection of 12 biographies of famous historical military leaders, some of which I knew little about. I brought it home hoping to increase my knowledge about these men.

I almost DNF'd the book while wading through the forward and introduction. I hadn't thought about what the title might imply - I just figured they were desperate for a catchy theme.

Nope, the unifying theme of this book is that real heroes are not only very aggressive, they routinely disobey orders. Real "he man" warriors, in the sense of "warrior" that contrasts with "soldier', let alone "military officer". The author bemoans that communications have gotten so much better that officers can no longer get away with this kind of disobedient initiative, claiming afterwards that they were the man on the ground, seeing an opportunity that couldn't be communicated to their superiors in time to use it. (He doesn't use quite these terms, but that's what he seemed to mean.)

I hoped that the author would calm down when he got into the actual biographical sketches, and describe what the 12 famous officers actually did. Well, he sort of does so - no explanation, insufficient detail, and airbrushing failures by merely mentioning them with no analysis or detail. I abandoned the book on the 8th page of his discussion of Robert Clive (aka "Clive of India")

Given the length of the front matter, I came close to reading my Pearl Rule target number of pages. The introduction ends on page xlvii. But some of that may have been table of contents and similar, which don't count.

Discussing this book with a friend, she suggested that if I wanted to fill in the story of Robert Clive, Wikipedia would probably a better source. She also flagged the publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, as appearing to specialize in right wing books. (Doesn't even the US right wing value hierarchy, with people obeying their superiors? Maybe "rugged individualism" trumps proper hierarchy in their minds, if only for people of sufficient status.

>94 ArlieS: They're Aynholes. The best rise unstoppably. Nauseating stuff.

>95 richardderus: Pearl rule for the win.

14. NonZero : the logic of human destiny by Robert Wright

This book presents a highly optimistic view of the longer term path of both cultural and biological evolution, then wraps it all up with a theological ending.

The basic idea is that non-zero sum interactions tend to appear and be successful, such that those who develop or adopt them are more successful than those who don't. The author asserts that while the specific form of such interactions is unpredictable, what can be predicted is that they will increase in both quantity and benefits over time.

He brings in history and biological history in support of this. Thus simple unicellular critters team up, producing both complex unicellular critters with organelles (mitochondria, chloroplasts, ...) and multicellular animals. Those animals then develop various social adaptations that farther improve their evolutionary success. Humans develop the ability to have complex culture, and do the same thing all over again, but at a cultural level.

The author imagines a future where humans somehow combine into a kind of multi-bodied intelligence, beyond what we already get from our ability to share ideas and critique them. (He's envisioning humanity-as-a-person, with humans becoming more like cells than people.)

He then imagines that this tendency was baked in by something approximating God, making all the suffering inherent in the evolutionary pattern (method, if you believe in this God) worthwhile. Add a mini-sermon or two about how red blood cells and certain social insects don't care about their individual lives, implying that humans in this super-organism of the future should be happy to do the same, and you have something that seems to me to be easily perverted into an apologia for theocratic totalitarianism.

The author seems unaware of these possibilities, but they rather set my teeth on the edge.

Likewise, I can't be overjoyed about e.g. larger states, with non-zero-sum interactions among their subjects, violently replacing a bunch of smaller states or tribes, even if their survivors are incorporated in the new and better state, and the average subject has more opportunities for non-zero sum interactions than the average tribesperson.

Still, it's good to see evolution given a net positive slant, and those ideas are worth thinking about.

3.5 for being somewhat original, though there are precedents, and competently written.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, philosophy, series: n/a, 2000
- Author (Robert Wright): male, American, born 1957, journalist, author not previously read
- English, public library, pages, 3.5 stars
- read Feb 1-24, 2026, book not previously read

I borrowed this book as a result of encountering it in the bibliography of Ian Morris' War! What is it good for?

>96 ArlieS: It's a sanity-saver when applied against that sort of people.

>97 ArlieS: Yeesh. Thanks for the warning. I have The Moral Animal (unread) on my shelves, and thought I had heard good things about Why Buddhism Is True, but now I'll check reviews of those before picking them up.

>99 ReneeMarie: I don't think the author is tending towards religious authoritarianism himself. He's probably just one of those people who feels a need for the kind of meaning provided by religion, but is too aware of ordinary reality to sign up for The Truth (TM) if it contradicts that reality.

15. Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree

This fantasy novel is the third in a series. It's a good light read, well crafted and with a few surprises.

The author was concerned that it was less cozy than the first two in its series, and might therefore by disliked by some of those who loved the first two.

This wasn't my problem, but I have other reasons to be slightly unhappy with the book. The viewpoint character doesn't know what she wants, and has a tendency to apologize ad nauseam for "letting people down", and similar. Except she does the apologizing offstage, while being really quite pushy in real life - except when she's dithering, that is.

I prefer characters I can identify with, or at least happily aspire to be more like. If they are somewhat idiotic, I prefer that to be the result of correctable flaws, like ignorance or youth. This character is fine in action, but the rest of the time I'm unimpressed. And since she's middle aged, I can't blame her behaviour on anything but her own psychological flaws.

Still, it's a decent light snack, with a couple of lovely twists near the end.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2025
- Author (Travis Baldree): male, American, born in 1977, novelist, audiobook narrator, and video game designer, author last read in 2024
- English, public library, 323 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Feb 20-26, 2026, book not previously read

The computer work is gradually winding down. Yesterday I binged on packaging ancient DOS games to work on the linux system. Other more important things needed doing still, but none were urgent, and I was feeling self indulgent, so games it was.

Of course now I may have to play them all, since the ones I already had on the prior linux system have been unavailable since early February, and I also bagged several new ones.

But I'll be back immersed in reading, and reading and writing about reading, any day now.

16. No More Napoleons : how Britain managed the threat from Europe from Waterloo to World War One by Andrew D Lambert

This is a great book. It's a focused history of a single century, narrowed still farther by to cover only British diplomatic, military, and political efforts to avoid another long, expensive European war, balancing European powers against each other to keep any one of them from becoming hegemonic, or even notably more powerful than all the rest.

This obviously failed with the start of World War I, another long European war, expensive in both blood and treasure. But for a century, they kept the lid on potential trouble, aided in part by European aversion to having anything like a repetition of the Napoleonic Wars.

I vaguely know about this, mostly from reading British children's historical novels, often set in wars or other crises, and often involving people elite enough to be involved in military or politics at fairly senior levels. But "vaguely" is the operative word here, even when the novels had a hidden agenda of teaching history to their young readers, as well as giving them a captivating story of adventure.

I learned a lot, and was motivated to look for other books covering the same relatively short period from other viewpoints, particularly that of France. I also intend to look for other books by the same author.

So why did I only rate the book at 4, rather than 4.5 or even 5? There was enough repetition to confuse me. I think the idea was to first cover the events in historical sequence, and then cover the same period thematically, focusing in one chapter on technological innovation and in another on shifting diplomatic alliances, even though that doesn't seem evident from the table of contents.

Maybe the problem was with me, but maybe a different way of writing would help someone only vaguely familiar with the period to keep the events in sequence in their own head. At any rate, when it came time to pick a number, I vacillated between 4.5 and 4, then came down on the side of 4, even though I expect to look for the same author's other works.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2025
- Author (Andrew David Lambert): male, British, born 1956, academic historian, author not previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 571 pages, 4 stars
- read Feb 3-Mar 2, 2026, book not previously read

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

17. Excellent sheep : the miseducation of the American elite and the way to a meaningful life by William Deresiewicz

This book is primarily about elite education in the United States - the experience and selection of students who attend universities like Harvard and Yale at the time the book was published (2015), and in the decades immediately previous, dating back to at least the years of the author's own college experience (he was born in 1964).

The author very much disapproves. He wants to see less competition to attend, real inculcation of some kind of service ethic, and far more time spent on liberal arts, specifically great literature, discussed in small seminars with actual professors.

A lot of extremely tired tropes were trotted out in support of the great literature. The author "knows" that this study is the only (or at least most effective) way for any person to develop a true self, not to mention independence of thought and action. (I say he "knows," because he neither cites evidence nor makes arguments in support of this Truth. The overall message seems to be "do what I tell you in order to become independent".)

As it happens, while I've read and enjoyed a lot of classic books, most of them were either non-fiction or written as pot-boilers for the less elite (though literate) of their day. I.e. authors like Defoe, Dickens, Shakespeare who wrote to pay their bills. Self-identified literature leaves me cold, both when I encountered it in school and when I read it independently.

I don't believe the author's faith in its value for everyone, having personal evidence to the contrary. I'm not even sure that I'm an exception in this case; maybe only 5-10% appreciate books written as literature, and another 10% claim to appreciate it as part of their performance of some kind of elite status. Or maybe 95% love it, and I am an exception. Either way, I got through college without touching literature qua literature, and am glad of it,

Another repetitive theme is the author's wish that his education had helped him figure out his true calling earlier, with fewer detours - by encouraging him to develop his Self in his classwork, rather than to pick a career and study for it. I won't quite call this sub-theme "whining", but it came close.

These weren't the only topics covered. But they may well have taken up half the book.

You can get the rest of this book's message from The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits, which I read in 2022.

I originally planned to accuse Deresiewicz of having possibly borrowed parts of his message from Markovits, but it turns out that the current book was published in 2015 and the one I preferred wasn't published until 2019. So Deresiewicz is cleared of that charge.

In case it isn't already obvious, I did not like this book, and do not recommend it. Read The Meritocracy Trap instead.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, education, series: n/a, 2015
- Author (William Deresiewicz): male, American, born 1964, author, essayist, and literary critic, author not previously read
- English, public library, 334 pages, 2.5 stars
- read Feb 26-Mar 7, 2026, book not previously read

My sister read this book and wanted to discuss it, so I tracked it down at my local library.

>104 ArlieS: I am obviously always going to be biased in favour of literature and the liberal arts but even I cannot say that he is entirely right in this day and age.
Important? yes certainly
More important than the study of micro biology, medicine, nuclear physics, rocket science, immunology, ecology? Mmmm.

>105 PaulCranswick: Individual mileage definitely varies in this area.

But when studying literature in school, I always felt my job was to determine what interpretation the instructor wanted, and echo it back to them.

This may have been a problem with my high school, or me being so far below average in this one area that I couldn't understand explanations suitable for the average student.

But it could just be that the characters in literary fiction are outside my real world experience, with motivations so different to my own that they might as well be Martians for all the empathy I feel.

Mind you, some real people also strike me that way. Is my cousin, with her childhood focus on fashion, her dubious marriage and eventual divorce any less alien to me than some hyper rich and/or noble equivalent, who stays married while having badly chosen affairs?

The Great Computer Conversion of 2026 is winding down. I'm not quite done yet, but it's getting closer, and I'm putting less effort into it.

So of course I celebrated at the library. Or rather, at 3 libraries, as well as requesting additional books by inter-library loan.

I now have 18 unstarted library books on hand, 3 partly read, one finished, and one ILL waiting for me at the local library.

Total unread library pages on hand: 7253.

I was mildly unhappy to find that whlle many were over 400 pages long, only 3 are over 500. (That only matters because I now also post in the 2026 Big Fat Books challenge.)

Time for me to get off the computer and go read something ;-)

p.s. Posting this from the new system. Everything to do with books moved there two weeks ago.

18. Swordheart by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This is a fun fantasy novel involving a magic sword inhabited by a human spirit. The spirit manifests as a swordsman when the sword is drawn, and disappears when it is sheathed. He is compelled to obey and protect the wielder of the sword - the first person to draw it after the previous wielder dies or gives up ownership.

A widowed housekeeper finds the sword among the clutter in her deceased employer's house. The employer has left her most of his property. His relatives are not happy, and are trying to coerce her into marriage so as to keep ownership of his property. She's been locked in her room by the relatives, and draws the sword while looking for a way to kill herself, so that her nieces will inherit, thereby being enabled to make decent marriages.

The spirit is not OK with this plan, but is perfectly happy to break her out of the room, fight any relatives or their servants so inclined, and escort her to seek help. This plan being acceptable to the widow, they set off together for the big city where they expect to find help, even while eluding pursuit.

And that begins the adventure.

I enjoyed this book, even though parts of it were a little shallow/cliché. I finished it in three days. And while I tried to convince myself to rate it at 3.5, I just couldn't do it, so I rated it at 4.0.

Then I added other books by the same author to my TBR.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, first of a series (and also part of another series), 2018
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author not previously read
- English, public library, 438 pages, 4.0 stars
- read Mar 7-9, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because an old friend told me how much he had enjoyed it.

19. Strategy: the logic of war and peace by Edward Luttwak

This was a very interesting book, at least to me, with limited background in the field, but a whole lot of ersatz "experience" via fiction. At my level of understanding, the book emphasizes and re-emphasizes two key concepts, with examples and specific levels of application. Neither are easy for this lay person to explain, even after all this reading, but I'll do my best.

The first and most emphasized concept is the paradoxical nature of war - or for that matter of any other endeavor that faces opposition from intelligent entities with their own conflicting goals. In the normal common sense world, there's usually a best alternative, given one's goals. The direct route will (usually) get you where you are going faster. A cheap tool is (usually) better than a more expensive one that accomplishes the same task in the same time, and is either equally durable or simply durable enough to last longer than you'll be doing that task. Etc. Etc.

The author would use less nuance than I have for the normal case, the better to contrast it to the opposed case. But I'm an engineer by avocation; tradeoffs are my bread and butter. I know that the direct route may be full of traffic, and that a single purpose tool is not a bargain for a person who does a set of related tasks rarely. (E.g. Also-ran home handypeople are well served by multi-bladed screw drivers, which professionals mostly wouldn't touch.) So I've already weakened the author's concept slightly, just in trying to write it up.

In war, there's an enemy who's sure to attempt to anticipate your moves, and adapt to whatever you do. The direct attack route will get you to the attack faster, with fewer delays and breakdowns en route (so more of your forces arrive ready to fight). But it will also tend to take you to the most heavily defended part of the border. An obscure, round about route might get you to a less defended part of the border. Sure, it will take longer, and you'll have more breakdowns and random accidents en route. But that might well be worth it to achieve surprise, and farther more have fewer opponents facing you. Except of course the enemy might have good intelligence - or make a lucky guess - and have the majority of their forces dug in on the obscure route - whereupon you arrive with fewer forces there than you would have at the (in this situation) less defended obvious route. Etc. Etc.

Likewise, you can put lots of effort into developing a "super weapon". Because it's new, you'll have fewer available than you have of the older tech. Your forces will need retraining. You'll need to adapt your tactics. These things have opportunity costs. Let's say you do this, and use the new weapon. Your enemy - and for that matter all observant third parties - will immediately start developing ways to reduce the advantage this gives you. Thus radar in the second world war spawned the development of radar-confusing chaff, radar sensors on fighters that led them straight to radar-using opponent planes - and of course to the development (or espionage) of radar designs by the opponents. It didn't provide a big advantage for long - certainly not long enough to win the war.

And that gets to the second concept that registered with me. Military advances (literal advances, but also things like new tech) tend to go well at the start, but the farther you push on, the more you outrun your supply lines, exhaust your troops, and similar. Meanwhile the enemy is reacting. You eventually reach the point where you are basically asking to be rolled back to where you started, or even farther, The enemy often obliges.

If you can't win the war in a single push, you are well advised to take manageable bites, then stop and digest them, moving supplies and reinforcements forward, perhaps building or improving roads or railroads and similar.

The author's term for this is the "culminating point", which you should not go beyond - but probably will, flush with enthusiasm by your recent successes.

I could go on. I haven't even touched the problem of alignment between levels. A tactical victory is no use if it doesn't support one's strategic goals. Etc. etc.

But this review is already quite long enough. I suggest that if you are interested in the topic, you should read the book.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, military science, series: n/a, revised edition 2001 (original 1987)
- Author (Edward Luttwak): male, American born in Romania and raised in Italy and England, born in 1942, author, author not previously read
- English, public library, 308 pages, 4 stars
- read Mar 2-14, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because I noticed it in the bibliography or notes of Ian Morris' War! What is it Good For?

20. The fabric of civilization : how textiles made the world by Virginia I. Postrel

This is a history of textile development, production, and use, including related activity like dying, textile trading, and textile consumers. It also features the historical use of cloth as money (in locally standardized size, material, and quality; this turns out to have developed, presumably independently, in at least 3 different areas, with different types of cloth involved.

It bears comparison with Elizabeth J. Wayland Barber's Women's Work: the first 20,000 years, which I read last December. Their coverage overlaps, but their emphasis is different.

Both are good books. Women's Work goes into more historical and technical detail on weaving, which was fascinating. Fabric of Civilization on the other hand goes all the way up to the present day, discussing recent innovations, including some that have not yet made it to market, and may never do so. It also covers the industrialization of cloth production during the Industrial Revolution, particularly the technical developments.

I can't tell you which of the two to read: I rated them both at 4, which isn't quite at the "read them both" level, so I can't just suggest you do what I did. You should probably pick based on the non-overlapping parts of their coverage.

Or if you really want to read all you can find in this general area, you might also consider Aarathi Prasad's Silk: A World History, particularly for its coverage of silk made from fibers produced by insects other than the classic domesticated silkworm. I read this in 2024, and rated it at 3.5.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history of technology, series: n/a, 2020
- Author (Virginia I. Postrel): female, American, born in 1960, writer, author not previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 304 pages, 4 stars
- read Mar 13-20, 2026, book not previously read

This book was suggested to me by an old friend, D.O., the same one who suggested my #18 for the year, Swordheart.

21. On the wing : insects, pterosaurs, birds, bats and the evolution of animal flight by David E. Alexander

I've reactivated my ability to borrow from a local university library, and this is one of the first fruits.

This is a book about the mechanics of powered flight, and each of the 4 groups to achieve it: insects, birds, bats and pterosaurs. It discusses how they might have evolved, given the constraints of their inherited biology and of physics. There's also a chapter on groups of animals that lost flight : their ancestors flew, but they do not.

It's a short book, so that pretty much sums it up. What it doesn't say is that I liked the book, and considered it very well done. If the topic interests you, you should read it.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, biology, series: n/a, 2015
- Author (David E. Alexander): male, American(?), age unknown (retired), academic (biology, biomechanics), author not previously read
- English, university library, 210 pages, 4 stars
- read Mar 17-23 2026, book not previously read

I read this book as a result of a mention or review in the Inquisitive Biologist, which is my go-to sources for biology book recommendations.

The library haul is now down to 2 books I've started, 15 I have not, and 1 I've finished but not yet reviewed, "Only" 6195 pages unread. I'm not counting books from my shelves which are also in flight.

22. Killed by a traffic engineer : shattering the delusion that science underlies our transportation system by Wes Marshall

This is a book about traffic engineering, stylistically more exposé than simple narrative. The basic message is that much traffic engineering is not data driven, and farthermore they don't care as much about safety as they should. The style made me more inclined to question the author's conclusions than I otherwise would have been, not to mention wondering what relevant data he'd omitted because it didn't support his argument.

It's essentially entirely about the United States, except when other countries are brought in as examples of doing things better.

Message 1: lots of things in traffic engineering manuals cannot be derived from any kind of research result.
Message 2: traffic engineering fails to prioritize safety as much as the author believes it should. (He never says how much that is; sometimes the book reads as if he believes perfect safety is the only appropriate goal.)

A lot of the information is interesting. Who knew how much modern standard practice started out as someone's best guess at what to do, and was never validated - or worse yet, alternative practices have since been demonstrated better for relevant purposes, but never made it into the manuals.

The constant harping on how bad current practice is, and in particular how unsafe it is, got old fast, and had the paradoxical result of making me suspect his accuracy of being severely compromised by his lack of objectivity.

That was not helped by the author frequently writing as if safety was an absolute goal (no tradeoffs), and should be the only thing traffic engineers consider. If taken seriously, that would result in banning all travel, even at trivial speeds, lest someone get injured; far better for everyone to be confined to their homes lest they fall and hurt themselves. or maybe to their beds, for much the same reason. He didn't make that argument; it's just that I kept feeling that it was a logical conclusion from the way he expressed his values, rather than merely an over-the-top reductio ad absurdum.

Engineering always involves tradeoffs. Perfect safety cannot exist. I'd rather see discussion of reasonable safety goals, and what should be traded off to achieve them, than what reads as complaints that traffic engineers ignore safety (almost) entirely.

I don't think the author really believes that safety should be the only goal in road design. He's probably right that efficient flow of cars is prioritized too much compared to safety of drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists, and probably too much compared to efficiency and usefulness of pedestrian and cyclist traffic. But he needs to say that, not mix overstatements with anecdotes about dead pedestrians.

Talking about dead pedestrian anecdotes for a minute - standard human brain bugs predictably cause most people to read a dozen such anecdotes, and conclude that children are dying like flies on every US street, and that they themselves are probably unsafe even on their own doorstep - rather than the alternative interpretation that a dozen deaths spread over years or perhaps decades is trivial compared to the US population, and they'd need accurate statistics to estimate the problem's true scale.

Of course that gets to the other problem pointed out by the author - American traffic statistics are bad, verging on useless. As used in traffic engineering, they could have been designed to obscure real effects and simply support current practices. Which is safer: an intersection with 50 fender benders and no deaths in some time period, or an intersection with 4 serious accidents producing 5 deaths and 5 life changing injuries in the same period - but no fender benders? How about one where none of the injured and dead were in the automobiles that hit them?

Traffic engineers, it appears, commonly count all accidents as equal, regardless of severity. In some contexts, they also fail to count people injured or killed unless they are in automobiles. So an intersection with many pedestrian deaths is likely to be rated safer than one with many slow speed fender benders. No common sense here. This is well worth pointing out, and i can certainly understand that the author might reasonably feel indignant.

Still, the book would have been improved for me by being less excited and more statistical.

Rated 3.5 for the combination of things i didn't know (good) and overly hypey presentation of same (bad).

Statistics:
- non-fiction, civil engineering, series: n/a, 2024
- Author (Wesley E. Marshall): male, American(?), age unknown, academic (civil engineering), author not previously read
- English, public library, 412 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Mar 7-23 2026, book not previously read

This book was borrowed from the library by my housemate. I saw her reading it, and asked her to hand the book to me when she was done, rather than returning it immediately.

Your reviews are so thoughtful, Arlie! I appreciate them very much.

>114 alsvidur: Thank you Emilie

23. Seapower states : maritime culture, continental empires and the conflict that made the modern world by Andrew Lambert

This is a history book about seapower states, a bit more than half devoted to describing the history of examples of this genre, from Minoan Crete to Great Britain. The rest is devoted to commonalities, comparisons, and evolution of the genre.

This is interesting, but the book is best seen as more descriptive than theoretical: the author starts with an understanding of what makes a sea state, fails to completely communicate this understanding, and then shows ways in which various states fit his mold. He doesn't ask whether this is a coincidence of small sample size (5 examples), or how often identifying traits were present in sates of other types.

Lambert basically defines a seapower state as a Great Power of aspiring Great Power that doesn't have the land area or land armies to achieve this status in the more common way, as a land-based Empire. It is instead dependent on maritime trade for most of its prosperity and power. Its navy is more powerful and more respected than its army. It deals with conflicts by forming and perhaps funding alliances, and by blockading unfriendly powers, slowly strangling their trade and access to whatever imports they rely on, until they become willing to negotiate peace. ("Unconditional surrender" is never part of their vocabulary.)

According to Lambert, such states can never be absolutist. They must share political power with their merchant class - otherwise they couldn't/wouldn't prioritize trade, and the naval power that facilitates it. But they can and often are oligarchies, rather than democracies, and farther widening political participation can cause them to fail their main mission. They are also prone to be anti-censorship and pro-free trade - at least more than their non-seapower peers at the time. When they acquire additional territory, it tends to be defensible islands that allow provide local bases and refueling stations, not territory qua territory.

There are also other types of state that are similar, but different. A sea state is a seapower state write small - it isn't big enough to be more than a middling power, even concentrating on its naval comparative advantage.

And a classic continental state/empire, like the US, can have a significant, even hegemonic navy, without prioritizing that navy. (Such states often go through phases of slashing naval funding, leading to naval collapse and often, later rebuilding from scratch.)

This is interesting, and the bits of history of places I didn't know well were even more interesting. But any contrary evidence is omitted, or glossed as contributing to that state's eventual decline.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2018
- Author (Andrew David Lambert): male, British, born 1956, academic historian, author of my #16 for 2026
- English, inter-library loan, 399 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Mar 12-24, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because I'd read and liked the same author's later book, No More Napoleons.

24. Success and luck : good fortune and the myth of meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

The basic thesis of this book is that luck is a huge factor in success, particularly in what I'd call "star system" fields, which he refers to as winner-take-all fields. These are fields where only a few make good, and most wind up as under-paid wannabees, if they don't drop out entirely. In oversubscribed fields with disproportionate rewards for the very best, the few winners will necessarily be both talented and hard working. But plenty of people with those characteristics won't succeed; thus those who do will also be notably lucky.

I'm very much aware of this, and have been throughout my working life. I made a rational decision to avoid star system career paths, and work in fields where there are jobs for all, or at least most competent people, and the difference in reward between the very best and the top 10% is relatively small. For most of my working life, there were not enough people good at what I did to make finding a new job at all difficult. I didn't get top dollar, but I was comfortable. This compares with the classic story of the would-be Hollywood star, waiting tables and hoping for a break.

The author's point here is that there are lots of careers like this, and in particular, this is now how business ownership and management works. Because of this, while the successful can point at their hard work and talent as reasons they deserve the rewards of their success, they are wrong to presume that those less successful didn't have essentially the same talent and work just as hard - like as not all the top competitors are much the same, including those who failed.

Of course that thesis makes this a political book, targeting the reality of the "American Dream", and the idea that it's unfair to take from the successful to give to the less successful.

It then dives farther into the political realm, by advocating a progressive consumption task. The idea is that people would be taxed on the difference between their income and their savings - at an increasing rate as the numbers increased. If you live on very little, but invest the rest, you'd pay as little tax as someone who made very little, and spent all of it.

This would theoretically increase investment, and reduce conspicuous consumption, thereby resetting expectations as to what consumption level is standard for one's income, ameliorating a keep-up-with-expectations treadmill that flows down from the top, as each class attempts to copy those a wealth class above them.

There would need to be adjustments to handle some special cases, such as retirees with significantly more consumption than current income, who are effectively dis-investing. And there's no requirement that the saving be used for productive investment - how could you define that anyway? - so they could be converted to gold and buried, for all the tax system cared.

At any rate, I see potential holes in this plan, and imagine there are more I do not see. Even the suggests agrees this would be a bad thing to initiate when not at full employment, as consumers buying less (to reduce their taxes) is likely to reduce employment father. (But what about the employment created to produce investment goods? If my savings get loaned to some business that buys more machines for its factory, surely there will be jobs - somewhere - making those machines.)

I also see plenty of holes in the luck argument. For every aspiring actor that doesn't become a star, in spite of being as talented and hardworking as those who do, there are plenty of others that are less talented and/or less hard working, and even more who don't pursue an acting career at all. We can argue that it was luck that gave the stars their talent in first place, and the personal traits and general health that enables their hard work, but that argument isn't the one the book is focused on. Everyone knows someone who failed because they weren't remotely good enough at whatever they tried, and others who didn't have the personality and/or health and/or mental health to try hard enough. So I don't see how the argument presented here will be convincing to those who don't already half believe it, particularly those who strongly believe that the successful all deserve their success more than any of the unsuccessful.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2016
- Author (Robert H. Frank): male, American, born 1945, academic economist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 187 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Mar 24-29, 2026, book not previously read

I added this book to my TBR as a result of the author being mentioned as an interesting thinker in Matt Ridley's The origins of Virtue

As a CPA who worked with small businesses, I would tend to call BS on those who claim business success is mostly luck. Hard work and talent and persistence are huge. Luck is certainly a factor, but bad luck can be overcome. Now, being in the right place at the right time in an emerging industry can certainly be lucky, but stupidity and bad work ethic can definitely overcome that, as well.

>118 ChrisG1: I wouldn't say that even Robert F. Frank is claiming that business success is mostly luck - just that luck is a significant factor at the top, where there are lots of essentially equal competitors. Though he then fails to mention the situation of successful small businesses that will never be unicorns.

My aunt's shop beat the odds (by surviving), but didn't turn into a chain that became a household name, and she didn't get to take a 6 figure(*) annual income from it, AFAIK, let alone a 9 or 10 figure income. She might just be the common hard working and talented case. But who thinks of her, when they could be thinking of Bezos ;-(

Other small business owners I've known have struggled and mostly folded. Even my aunt gave it up when her husband got a job offer in another city. But that seems to be the standard thing. And meanwhile, I'm cheering on the son of a friend, who's attempting to start a junk hauling business. Maybe he'll make it. Meanwhile, I intend to be his customer.

(*) This was late in the twentieth century - 6 figure was still special.

25. The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman

This book about human biology and evolution can be looked at in two ways. It's either a layperson's description of some aspects of human evolution, including reasonable footnotes, or a book that baldly asserts a theory about human language evolution that feels no need to provide supporting evidence for that theory, even though contradictory theories have been taken seriously in my lifetime.

If the author had been an autodidact, science writer, journalist, or other amateur, I'd have presumed it was a cherry picked mass of incompletely digested factoids, intended to establish the author's competence, followed by a crack pot theory.

The author, is however, a retired biology professor from the University of Sydney. This strongly suggests she knows what she's talking about.

The author has a lot to say about the difficulties of birthing and raising human infants, compared to other infants. She then asserts that the main reason language evolved was to facilitate shared child raising. I didn't notice any evidence being cited beyond just so stories. It appeared to be "obvious to any right thinking person".

I have no idea whether the theory is right or wrong, but I don't appreciate "science" that rests on so-called common sense, particularly when what's obvious common sense to one author is probably equally obvious nonsense to another author, or perhaps the reader.

Forgiving that, though, the book covers much interesting material about human and primate evolution, and except for one nit below, I haven't found significant inconsistencies with other works, except to the extent that those works were significantly older, and unaware of more recent discoveries.

It's worth reading for that coverage, if you haven't already read much the same thing somewhere else.

But I'd wait before deciding to treat the language-for-childcare hypothesis as anything but speculative. I didn't see convincing evidence cited here.

One major nit: part of the background given here blatantly contradicts an earlier well known theory, without providing any real supporting evidence. This is the theory that human infants come complete with specialized language learning skills, in addition to generalized learning skills that can be used for anything.

This is the second author I've read that completely dismisses the well known contradictory theory. That one cited a paywalled article in a reputable scientific journal - but only one such article - and provided no real supporting arguments. This one skips even that citation.

Maybe consensus among evolutionary biologists has become so strongly opposed to the old theory that no one steeped in that environment sees any need to explain the switch, not even to laypeople who presumably arrive "knowing" the old theory as scientific "fact". And OTOH, maybe evolutionary biologists are human, subject to all the usual human perceptual distortions and reasoning failures.

At any rate, I'd love to see a lay accessible and lay comprehensible explanation of that change, not just "it's not true".

Statistics:
- non-fiction, human evolution, series: n/a, 2025
- Author (Madeleine Beekman): female, Australian, age unknown (emeritus), academic biologist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 308 pages, 4 stars
- read Mar 26-Apr 2, 2026, book not previously read

This book was recommended to me by LibraryThing's new recommendation system, with "new books" selected.

Interesting comments and interesting ideas.

26. Clockwork boys by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This is a fantasy novel featuring 3 condemned criminals and a scholar being sent on a mission to find the source of their neighbour's more-or-less unstoppable magical soldiers - and some way to counter them. It's set in the same universe as Swordheart.

It's an engaging story, but badly paced. The author wrote more than she figured was reasonable for a single book, so split it in two at a semi-arbitrary point. I spent the last third of the book concerned about how they'd manage to resolve the plot arcs in the remaining pages. The answer turned out to be that none were resolved.

That got the book a rating of 3.5, rather than 4.0. I might have been more forgiving if the library had at least possessed that second volume, but no such luck. They either didn't have it, or didn't have it in tangible paper form. I'm now waiting for a copy to arrive via inter-library loan.

I am not, however, willing to give up on this author's non-juvenile fantasy. Since I was requesting ILL books by her anyway, I requested 2 others in the same world (different subseries) at the same time.

What I'm really looking for, though, is more about the Temple of the Rat that featured in Swordheart, and the associated sect. I am unfortunately not sure the author has written more about them; they were not mentioned in Clockwork Boys.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, first of a series, 2018
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author of my #18 for 2026
- English, public library, 261 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Apr 2-4, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because it was the start of a series by a new-to-me author, and I'd liked the book of theirs I'd read as my #18 this year.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend ahead, Arlie.

>123 PaulCranswick: Thank you Paul

27. Outliers : the story of success by Malcolm Gladwell

This book spent a long time in my physical TBR shelves, before I finally picked it up 2 months ago, probably in a week when I was short of library books. I read it in two chunks, with a big interruption in the middle when library books were plentiful, and needed a lot of attention if I wanted to return them on time.

The author has written a number of best sellers which made an impact on the popular culture of the reading/educated public. I probably bought this one based on its reputation, some time closer to when it was new - but not immediately, since the book was apparently printed in 2011, 3 years after its copyright.

As is normal for such an author, the book contains a mix of interesting, initially counter-intuitive facts not previously known to me, and platitudes, over-generalizations, and similar time wasters.

The most interesting part, to me, was the very beginning, devoted to the initially surprising finding that sports professionals' birth months often cluster, with some months much more common than others. Moreover, the pattern depends on the particular sport - and, I imagine, the nation the athletes come from. The apparent cause is that children competing in the sport are grouped by age, with some particular cut off date. Those children who are oldest within their age grouping tend to play better than those who are youngest - 11 months is huge, at sufficiently young ages. Those children who play best in their leagues get extra coaching, and guidance towards a professional league, and the others do not - even if some child 11 months younger plays better, for his/her actual age, than the stars of his/her age group played 11 months earlier.

This strikes me as a typical example of unintended consequences, which make a lot of sense when you look closely - and also create presumably unintended unfairness.

The book continues with ever more examples of people with lots of talent - but not more than other potential competitors - being in the right place and the right time to come out on top. There are other odd factoids about correlations about groups of people. I wasn't sure that all of them were as data-supported as the text implied - what alternate explanations had been ignored? Did the research replicate? etc.

Overall rating: 3. aka "it's OK"

And it may be useful to be aware of these arguments, since the book does get cited by other popularizing authors.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, popular sociology, series: n/a, 2008
- Author (Malcolm Gladwell): male, British-Canadian, born 1963, journalist, author previously read
- English, own shelves, 309 pages, 3 stars
- read Mar 26-Apr 2, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because it was languishing on my shelves unread.

28. France : a modern history from the Revolution to the War with Terror by Jonathan Fenby

This book is a narrative history of France from the defeat of Napoleon I to the author's present-day. It's almost entirely focused on political history. There's often a blow-by-blow account of political succession, though given France's tendency to churn through Prime Ministers I doubt it managed to discuss every single one of them in a mere 536 pages.

There's a lot of violence in this story. Reading this book, I'd get the impression that political violence was almost as normal in France as it is in India, where I've heard from unhappy expats that they can't seem to hold an election cycle without at least one successful assassination. I'm not sure whether, for France, this impression is just availability bias - the author may well be describing most of the violent episodes in the 200 years from 1815 to 2015. However, they've been through a lot of constitutions in that time; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constitutions_of_France and many of those were ushered in by violence of some kind.

The book is decent, and a lot of the content was either new to me, or things I'd only heard of vaguely. Unfortunately, though, it tends towards tedious recitation of events.

Also, it makes some strange assumptions about what readers know; the simplest French word will be translated to English, but there are constant references to symbolic places that aren't explained even on their first mention. This would be equivalent to saying "John Doe moved to the White House" instead of "John Doe was elected President of the United States", except with similar phrases for (I think), for becoming Prime Minister, and probably also for taking on several other cabinet posts. Sometimes the person's official title is also used, close enough to figure out what is meant, and sometimes not.

The author is a British journalist. Perhaps these terms are commonly used in British journalism about France, though not in American or Canadian journalism. I made the decision not to bother googling the symbolic meaning of all these places. Now that I try to google them from memory, I find at least one not listed in Wikipedia (maybe I misremembered it). So this adds some unneeded confusion.

I'm rating the book at 4 for being useful and informative (5), but dry as dust (-.5) and unnecessarily confusing (-.5).

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2015
- Author (Jonathan Fenby): male, British, born 1942, journalist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 536 pages, 4 stars
- read Mar 24-Apr 11, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because No More Napoleons : how Britain managed the threat from Europe from Waterloo to World War One (my #16 for this year) made it clear to me how little I knew about modern French history, and farthermore had me wondering how the events recounted in that book, from a British POV, might look from a French POV.

I picked this one partly because it was easily available, and partly because it started at exactly the right point, though going a bit beyond my target time period. Most of my easily available alternatives covered a longer time period, and so could be expected to go into less depth on the period I cared most about.

29. City of fortune : how Venice ruled the seas by Roger Crowley

This is a history of Venice starting with how it became powerful, and ending when it was eventually down to a mere city with glorious memories.

It was quite interesting, and taught me a lot I didn't know.

The author has calmed down since writing Empires of the Sea and no longer writes thriller-style history. I think he's also scaled back his habit of vivid visual descriptions, which might have worked better for me if I were a more visual thinker.

Like an awful lot of history, I found once again that a group I had kind of liked and respected was prone to rapacity, dishonesty, and rather a lot of violence. Centuries later, others did unto them what they had done themselves as part of their rise to power. I wound up feeling that turnaround is fair play.

Overall, it's a decent read, and I oscillated between rating it 3.5 and 4.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2011
- Author (Roger Crowley): male, British, born in 1951, non-academic historian, author read in 2024
- English, public library, 418 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Mar 31-Apr 14, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book mostly because of having recently read Seapower States, though it first got on my TBR because I noticed it in the bibliography or notes of The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease.

30. The wonder engine by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This fantasy novel is the second part of my #26, arbitrarily separated to reduce individual book length. Fortunately it's much better paced, and works for me as a stand alone novel, though I'm not sure how it would be if I hadn't read the first volume.

I enjoyed it a lot, and am continuing to collect other novels by the author.

But there really isn't much I can say about it without spoilers.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2018
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author of my #18 and #26 for 2026
- English, inter-library loan, 364 pages, 4 stars
- read Apr 13-15, 2026; book not previously read

I read this book because it was the second part of my #26 for the year.

This author's works are a bit of a PITA for me to acquire - my local libraries prefer to carry them either as e-books or not at all. Hurrah for there being a system where a member of one of a large group of libraries can easily request that books be sent from any other member library, without even bothering a librarian to make the request. They won't let you request something your library has, but they consider e-book, audio-book, and paper book forms of a given title to be different books.

31. Paladin's grace by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

I'm reading my way through this author's non-juvenile books almost as fast as libraries in the semi-local system can ship them to my local library for me to pick up. (I'm slowed only by not wanting to have so many at once that it would be difficult to finish them all before they came due.)

This one is the first in a series of romance novels featuring berserker paladins of a deity who had died, leaving the paladins without divine guidance (which had kept them from attacking the wrong targets, and brought them out of their berserk fits appropriately) and emotionally and spiritually bereft. Many of this deity's priests and paladins had died in the aftermath, often by suicide; the survivors have been taken in by the Temple of the Rat, which we'd encountered in Swordheart. So still no backstory abut the Rat God's origin, which I'd really like to read, but we're getting more about his priesthood, temples, etc..

All three of the other novels I've read by this author feature a romance subplot, but this series crosses the line, with the romance becoming the primary plot with the adventure becoming the sub-plot. That said, there is a significant adventure plot in this one that doesn't feel tacky and fabricated to give the character's something to do while falling in love, or obstacles to that love.

I also enjoyed the unusual characters. The male lead is a broken paladin. The female lead is a perfumer - not an occupation I see a lot of. Their internal issues are somewhat stereotypical - lots of guilt and duty for the paladin, and an abuse history for the perfumer - leading to romance-novel-appropriate communication issues and self-doubt. But the characters are otherwise non-stereotypical.

We also get reintroduced to two characters we met in Swordheart, which is enjoyable, and tells us roughly where we are in that universe's chronology.

A good read, if you want a heterosexual romance novel in a fantasy universe.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, first of a series, 2021
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author of my #18, 26, and 30 for 2026
- English, inter-library loan, 399 pages, 4 stars
- read Apr 15-16, 2026; book not previously read

32. Paladin's strength by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This is the second in the series of fantasy romance novels I started with my #31 directly above.

The characters overlap somewhat - minor characters from Paladin's Grace are major characters here, and major characters from that book are mentioned here. Parts of the non-romance portion of that story lead to parts of the non-romance portion of this one. It's also in the same world and approximate time period as all the author's novels I've read so far, with some cross references.

But basically, this is a (het) romance novel, where the characters meet while on separate missions, and wind up working on both missions together, on their way to a happy ending.

As usual, I don't want to spoil the novel by revealing the plot - even what I've written so far may be too much. But I enjoyed it a lot.

One thing worth noting: the awkward initial scene with witty dialog that attracted me to Swordheart also appears here, in a different form. The initial scene is so worth rereading that I somewhat inadvertently did so while writing this review. This tempted me to raise my rating of the book from 4 to 4.5.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2021
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author of my #18, 26, 30, and 31 for 2026
- English, inter-library loan, 480 pages, 4 stars
- read Apr 16-17, 2026; book not previously read

<129 >130 ArlieS: I enjoyed both of these. I particularly liked the sock knitting paladin in the first one.

> 131 Kingfisher's is so good with little details, that give the result at least an extra half star.

33. War and peace and war : the life cycles of imperial nations by Peter Turchin

This is a book for lay people about a theory of history. The author is an academic who has done a lot of work in this area, even though his education and pre-retirement academic post(s) were in biology. It explains by means of the usual just-so stories what the author also claims to have explained with more academic rigour (and more math) in other books and articles.

I'm conditionally impressed - but I've added two of his more rigorous books to my TBR, along with others works cited in this one. I want to check whether the just-so-stories hold up, at least as best as I can.

The basic theory is that internal trust and cohesion creates success in war. The author refers to this asabiya, a term he takes from the 14th century scholar Ibn Khaldun. (Other possible terms include "group cohesiveness", "social solidarity", etc.)

Per Khaldun (and Turchin), asabiya is cyclical. High asabiya breeds military success, which breeds peace and prosperity, which breeds intra-group conflict and inequality, which reduces asabiya, which breeds failure in war, which replaces intra-group with inter-group conflict, which restores asabiya. I think Turchin adds inequality to this picture, as part of what feeds the intra-group conflict, but he may have got that from Khaldun, who i have not read.

Turchin definitely adds a theory of meta-ethnic frontiers. The more different "we" are from our neighbours ("them"), the more vicious the conflict, and the higher our internal solidarity. And if we're too successful, the core areas of our empire have no immediate not-us neighbours, and can fall into an asabiya black hole, remaining there until and unless the fortunes of history and war bring them new and very different neighbours.

He also adds something he calls "secular cycles", which seem to me to be basically the observation that a generation or two after conquering the neighbours, our elite becomes out of touch with our common folk, competing with each other and oppressing the commons to provide themselves with resources for this competition. This worsens until neighbours start trying to take advantage of our disarray, whereupon we might reunite against them, but at a lower level of internal cohesiveness. But once we deal with those neighbours, we go back to quarreling among ourselves. After 2 or 3 of these cycles, our empire survives only in history books and ruins.

This is an interesting frame for the rise and fall of empires, great powers, moderate powers, and hegemonic civilizations.

What I don't know is whether it has enough truth to provide predictive (post-dictive?) power.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, historical theory, series: n/a, 2006
- Author (Peter Turchin): male, Russian-American, born in 1957, academic (ecology, evolutionary biology, and math), author not previously read
- English, public library, 405 pages, 4 stars
- read Apr 9-19, 2026, book not previously read

>133 ArlieS: What a fascinating review, Arlie. I love your comment about being "conditionally impressed"!

Have a great weekend.

34. Legalist by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

This novel is a fantasy in more than one sense. It's set in a world where psionic powers are taken for granted, and even baked into the culture. And it features politicians who are altruistic, honest, far-seeing, and successful.

This roughly follows the usual pattern of this author's many novels. His viewpoint characters are good people, with a lot less than the usual human tendency to mistake "good for me" for "good for everyone".

As always for this author, the viewpoint character is somewhat of a polymath - intelligent, athletic, and an excellent lawyer and politician. He even has good staff. Equally commonly for this author, it follows a chunk of its viewpoint character's career.

We follow this character from when he's first elected to the country's Council (parliament), to shortly after he becomes prime minister. The story follows 3 related tracks - political activity, in council and in the constituency; surviving violent chicanery; and (romantic) courtship. There's a generous supply of bad people to act as threats and obstacles. All very formulaic, to be sure, but it's a formula I enjoy.

It's not however quite as well executed as I've come to expect from this author. He's either lost a really good critical first reader, or his own quality and attention to detail is beginning to slip. (I've made similar observations of some of his other recent work.)

At any rate, it's a nice light snack, tasty enough if you like this sort of thing. Just not as good as some of this author's other work.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2025
- Author (L. E. Modesitt Jr.): male, American, born 1943, novelist, author of 24 books I read or reread in 2025
- English, public library, 560 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Apr 21-24, 2026; book not previously read

I read this author's new novels on sight, so put a hold on this one while my local library was merely in the process of acquiring it.

Pearl Rule 3. The soul thief by Cecelia Holland

This historical fiction novel, that I'd have considered filing as fantasy, didn't work for me. There was a time in the past where I'd have been fine with it, giving it a gentleman's C as a rating. (3.0). But in spite of running out of other unread library fiction, and the approach of un-renewability, I wasn't motivated to pick it up again.

My fundamental complaint is that it bored me, in spite of a stream of events. My secondary complaint is that there are hints of upcoming excessive darkness, with the female protagonist in a no-win situation while the male protagonist (her twin) has interesting adventures attempting to rescue her. (The alternative would probably be a deus ex machina in the form of the female lead's psychic powers enabling the defeat of her captor.)

Back to the library it goes.

This, or possibly a later volume in its series, was a book bullet from quondame.

>136 ArlieS: Oh dear, of all Cecelia Holland's books I think those of the Corban Loosestrife Saga are my favorites. Yes, they do belong under the fantasy pergola, though the historical parts are as masterful as her straight historical novels. It's been over a decade since my second reading of the series, so no details, but I don't revisit books I find depressing - not even The Stranger.

>137 quondame: De gustibus non disputandis. Sometimes an otherwise good book just doesn't work for someone - me in this case.

35. Taming Silicon Valley : how we can ensure that AI works for us by Gary Marcus

This starts as a book about the problems with Large Language Models, aka chatbots, too frequently referred to as if they were the entirety of Artificial Intelligence. It continues with complaints about Big (Digital) Tech in general. It follows up for recommendations for political fixes.

The book is relatively solid. While it's clearly pushing a cause, rather than e.g. reporting on investigations, the author seems to know what he's talking about, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence hype. Put another way, he's in the field, not just a journalist or generic pundit. His complaints and proposed solutions get a bit more formulaic when he gets beyond large language models.

I subscribed to this author's blog for a time after first LLMs became publicly available, and all I could seem to find out about them amounted to non-critical hype, even from supposedly technical people in the field presenting off the record to a technical audience. I was highly suspicious of the hype, yet everyone I knew - many involved in digital technology - appeared to believe everything they'd been told.

I somehow stumbled on this one blogger who knew more about the field than I did, and agreed with me that much of the hype could not be substantiated. I clung to him like a lifeline, as giving me emotional and social permission to continue my incredulity, and even giving me a bit of the knowledge needed to substantiate my position.

This stage didn't last. On the one hand, there was soon a cottage industry of reporting LLM absurdities. And on the other hand, the blogger's attempts to monetize his blog rubbed me the wrong way, and I unsubscribed.

But in the meanwhile, the blogger had announced that he had a book coming out, and I added it to my TBR. This is that book.

I fear the author is preaching to a choir, and it will have no impact on anyone who isn't already unhappy about the digital tech industry. He's also citing egregious examples without placing them in statistical context.

I believe that a random LLM is currently more likely to give you accurate information than your postman(*), and slightly more likely to be able to cite sources. They are higher risk for inaccuracy than decent academic writing - bad enough that I personally won't use them for anything where I cannot personally judge the results - but they are far better than the average clueless-but-opinionated idiot, and may even be better than news media about selected topics.

If you are Joe Random Idiot, ask-a-chatbot may give you better information than any other alternative you are likely to use. But that's an exceedingly low bar. My own available alternatives are rarely that bad, and when they are, I settle for "I don't know" as my answer.

If you are doing something that requires accuracy, quality, etc., you simply can't trust them.

But this book isn't going to convey that message, let alone fix anything.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, politics, series: n/a, 2025
- Author (Gary Marcus): male, American, born in 1970, academic (psychologist, retired) and Artificial Intelligence pundit, author's blog previously read
- English, public library, 235 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Apr 15-25, 2026, book not previously read

(*) I dropped a health blogger for suggesting that since average folks were more likely to trust their postman for health information than e.g. any official source (which might be true), the right thing to do was to induce postmen and similar to give the "right" advice, not to mention any hint of nuance, or suggestion that this particular advice is based on our current best knowledge. She was also dumbing down her blog posts appropriately for that hypothetical postman, making them useless to me.

>136 ArlieS: Life is too short, and there are too many good books, to spend time with one that is boring you!!

36. A wizard's guide to defensive baking by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This is a juvenile fantasy by the same author whose non-juvenile works I've been devouring. It was popular in the 75ers in 2022 or earlier. I picked up a book bullet from MickyFineRocks. My local libraries only had it in ebook and audiobook form, so it languished on my TBR list until I picked up another recommendation for the same author - that the local libraries had as a physical book. I liked that book enough to start bringing in this author's other works by inter-library loan.

This book is decent enough, but somehow fails to scratch my particular itches enough to rise to "really, really good" by my idiosyncratic tastes. It kept my attention - indeed, I raced through it in two days - but I don't think it would have motivated me to use ILL to get more by this author.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, non-series, juvenile, 2020
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author of my #18, 26, 30, 31, and 32 for 2026
- English, inter-library loan, 306 pages, 3 stars
- read Apr 25-26, 2026; book not previously read

>141 ArlieS: Yep, different turnons - A wizard's guide to defensive baking did get me to check out more by Kingfisher/Vernon. Her humor is on target for me.

37. The pursuit of power : Europe 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

This history book is well described by its title. I enjoyed it, and learned a lot from it.

Unfortunately, I've made the mistake of reading multiple history books with overlapping coverage at more or less the same time, so I'm not entirely certain who said what. (You'll be seeing this disclaimer again for books finished in May and perhaps June.) But this book definitely worked for me.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2016
- Author (Richard J. Evans): male, Great Britain, born in 1947, academic (history), author of 3 books read in 2025
- English, public library, 819 pages, 4 stars
- read Feb 28-Apr 30, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book partly as a result of recommendations associated with Jonathan Fenby's France: A Modern History from the Revolution to the War with Terror, and partly because I'd read and appreciated other books by this author.

>143 ArlieS: Richard J. Evans is possibly the leading scholar on German history in the UK today and I have his impressive but difficult to read Reich Trilogy on the shelves.

He has of course famously clashed with Holocaust deniers and acted as Expert Witness in the libel case involving David Irving.

I haven't read the book on wider European history, which is a decade old already, but I will get to it soon I guess.

>144 PaulCranswick: That Reich Trilogy was my introduction to Evans, thanks to a book bullet from drneutron. It was worth the effort of reading, even though it took more than a month per volume.

38. The relentless revolution : a history of capitalism by Joyce Oldham Appleby

This is another history book well summed up by its title.

The earlier chapters are the best, as the author stresses that capitalism was new and different, even though there had always been trade. She stresses the cultural changes in attitudes and expectations, with evidence from contemporary writing.

The later chapters struck me as OK, more or less standard economic history of the period. If you read it, read it for the early chapters, which may help you appreciate the mind set of pre-capitalist and proto-capitalist people, rather than merely know intellectually that capitalist values and practices were new and strange.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2010
- Author (Joyce Oldham Appleby): female, United States, born in 1929, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, public library, 494 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Apr 18-May 4, 2026, book not previously read

39. Paladin's Faith by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This is the fourth volume in the same fantasy romance series as my #31 and #32 for this year. The third volume took so long to become available, that I read the fourth volume first.

This volume features two more of the group of surviving paladins of the same dead god. Both are a bundle of insecurities, particularly the male, who believes that everything he ever attempts fails. The female lead is far more self-confident, and spends most of the story with the other two paladins working for her. That doesn't stop her becoming very much involved with the male paladin.

Any more would be spoiling, but there's quite a lot of plot other than the romance, which even raises what could be major issues of right and wrong. Those aren't followed up here, but one at least is left as a seed for a future book.

Beyond that, anything I could say would be a spoiler. Bottom line though: I liked it, and am tempted to reread it before returning it, since getting my hands on these books has been rather a PITA.

It also just missed qualifying for the Big Fat Book challenge.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2023
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author of 6 author books I've read in 2026
- English, inter-library loan, 490 pages, 3.5 stars
- read May 5-7, 2026; book not previously read

Pearl Rule 4. Anti-Piketty : capital for the 21st century edited by Jean-Philippe Delsol, Nicholas Lecaussin, and Emmanuel Martin

This economics/politics book purports to be a collection of essays refuting various aspects of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Unfortunately, it's prone to snideness, insult, ad hominem arguments, and unsourced statements of "Truth" that are in fact quite arguable.

There are probably some valid critiques hidden among the examples of how not write a respectable academic critique. I just don't have the patience to sift them out of the surrounding rubbish.

This is unfortunate. I found Capital in the Twenty-First Century impressive and interesting, which means I'd really like to have help identifying points where the author has gone wrong, lest I become a True Believer (TM), rather than simply appreciating the author's good points. I hesitated to Pearl rule the book lest my distaste for it was merely an example of confirmation bias.

But from the Foreword, which suggested that people who like Piketty's work haven't read it, through the Introduction, which declares Piketty to be a Socialist (horrors), even though all forms of socialism have been permanently and completely refuted by the collapse of the Soviet Union - I was pretty much foaming at the mouth. Nor were those the only points I objected to - far from it.

I abandoned the Introduction mid-way, and tried one of the essays inside, in the hopes that a trio of overly polemic editors had collected essays by more measured analysts, who might have something to say more useful than "he's bad" and " he's bad because he's not libertarian, even though libertarianism is Gospel Truth". The one I picked failed to impress me, in spite of trying to select one by title that would be more likely to be useful. It was better than the front matter, but that's not saying much.

I'm out of here!

Note to self: this book was published by Cato Institute. If this is their typical quality, don't bother reading anything else they publish.

This was basically an exercise in preaching to the choir, in particular a choir who wanted emphasis on the badness of the opposition.

40. Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

This is the third volume in the same fantasy romance series as my #31, #32 and #39 for this year. It took rather a long time to get my hands on this one, so I read it after the fourth volume.

This volume follows much the same pattern set by the other three, except that this time both the paladin and his love interest are male. We also learn lots more about the gnoles, one of whom is a major character,

Beyond that, anything I could say would be a spoiler.

Statistics:
- fiction, fantasy, series (not first), 2021
- Author (Ursula Vernon): female, American, born in 1977, writer, author of 7 other books I've read in 2026
- English, inter-library loan, 298 pages, 4 stars
- read May 8-9, 2026; book not previously read

p.s. This review might have been longer, if I hadn't encountered and researched two computer issues in the course of adding the book to my library and writing this review. Now I'm mostly motivated to get out of my desk chair.

On the good side, I managed to fix one of the issues, thanks to a helpful user of the same app who answered my request for help on a relevant forum.

Maybe I'll get lucky with the other problem as well. (I posted about it too.)

41. The rise and fall of the great powers : economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 by Paul M. Kennedy

This is a solid history book. It dates from 1987, before some modern changes of emphasis had become universal. (That's fine with me.) It shows up in lots of bibliographies.

The author's emphasis is on the eventual effect of economic and industrial power on relative diplomatic and military power. I suspect this of being something of a new insight at the time, at least in this form, while at the same time having been common knowledge among just about everyone involved with inter-polity conflict, in its more simplified form. (Aka, "the US is bigger and richer than Iran, Vietnam, and Denmark/Greenland, so they have to do what it wants" - examples picked by me for their non-support of the naive version of this thesis.)

In a more nuanced form, allowing for difference of commitment, asymmetric strategies, it's similar, and remains true today. In a knock down, dragged out conflict, rather than a skirmish or blitzkrieg, the economically stronger power generally wins. (But since 1945 we need to add some verbiage about willingness risk nuclear annihilation.) Note that we don't have to add verbiage about willingness to risk casualties - that's part of the nuanced version, and US unwillingness to put infantry into Iran accounts for a part of the debacle current as I write this review.

This book looks at a lot of different great powers in this light, often showing their rise to great power status, or their fall from it, or both. This was very informative and interesting, even though the general history was already familiar.

At the very end, there's a section about the future - from date of writing to the year 2000 and perhaps a bit beyond. This has aged fairly well, somewhat to my surprise. (It totally misses the longer term working out of the results of the US becoming the "sole super power", but that's beyond its scope.)

Note by the way that the Berlin Wall came down two years after this book was published, so perhaps 3 or so after it was completed. So the future was about to become quite "interesting".

I liked this book, and should perhaps have given it a higher rating than 4. My problem is that I finished it 10 days ago, and its content had furthermore overlapped other books I read concurrently. So by now I'm not entirely sure what things I remember were in this which book.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 1987
- Author (Paul M. Kennedy): male, Great Britain, born in 1945, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, university library, 677 pages, 4 stars
- read Apr 3-May 9, 2026, book not previously read

This book got onto my TBR because of a reference in Ian Morris' War! What is it good for?

42. Milk : a local and global history by Deborah M. Valenze

This is a history book about milk: all kinds of milk, mostly as food. It seems slightly imbalanced towards Western experience, and perhaps also to cow's milk; perhaps those are the more available sources, or those judged more relevant to English speaking readers.

Overall, it's a decent book, with lots of material previously unknown to me.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2011
- Author (Deborah M. Valenze): female, United States, born in 1953, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, university library, 351 pages, 4 stars
- read May 2-21, 2026, book not previously read

This book got onto my TBR when I noticed a footnote referencing it on Wikipedia.

Arlie - you write such thoughtful reviews and keep excellent statistics! I should aspire to emulate you, but I know myself - that's a long term project.

You got me with three BBs: No More Napoleons, The Fabric of Civilization, and Milk: a Local and Global History. The Fabric of Civilization has been on my radar for a while, but the other two are new to me.

I'm already a T. Kingfisher - I'm glad you're enjoying her work! Did you know that she's got a new novel coming out in August - Daggerbound - with Learned Edmund? I'm doing some rereading ahead of it.

>152 Dejah_Thoris: Good to hear that a sequel to Swordheart is finally coming out. Now if only my library would acquire it promptly.

(I had to impose strong policies to control my tendency to tsonduku. I now don't allow myself to buy new books unless I'm reasonably sure they'll be reread, or used for reference. Otherwise I'd have had to buy a second house for all the books and bookshelves that wouldn't fit into the house I live in ;-))

T. Kingfisher is good enough that I might buy books of hers, but there have been a couple that I rated as "meh", so I'm hesitant.

43. Reading in the brain : the science and evolution of a human invention by Stanislas Dehaene

This is a lovely book about the neurology involved on reading, in detail, with lots of information about how we know what we know. This is pretty much catnip for me. If I could find more books like this, I'd spend even more time reading than I already do.

The book also looks at the process of first learning to read, and then becoming an expert (i.e. normal adult) reader, along with some of the ways this process can go astray. Related to this, the author has strong opinions about how reading should be taught.

Unexpectedly, it has interesting things to say about differences between languages, the processes of learning them, and the difference in results.

It's a lot easier to learn to read Italian, which is extremely regular, than English, which is not. Italian-speaking children learn to read faster than English-speaking children. As a side effect, while some Italians have the same problem features that underlie dyslexia in some English speakers, Italian quasi-dyslexics don't have major reading problems. You can find the underlying traits, if you look, and they may cluster among less capable readers - but you pretty much don't get dyslexic illiteracy/semi-literacy in Italian.

Chinese on the other hand, is rather more work to learn to read and write than English. So many signs must be memorized. School children spend a lot more time to develop similar adult proficiency.

Related to this, the human brain handles reading in much the same way, whatever the language. The same parts of the brain are co-opted to handle reading in just about everyone, and the exceptions tend to involve serious brain damage disabling the first-choice regions at an age where the victim was still young enough to adapt (e.g. before they learned to read). Adults with damage to these areas have a much harder time learning to use other, less effective brain regions for the same task.

Overall, this book was fascinating. It pitched its complexity level just right - enough detail and evidence to get my teeth into, but not so much that I had to read with a glossary or basic textbook open on the desk in front of me.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, biology (neurology), series: n/a, 2009
- Author (Stanislas Dehaene): male, France, born in 1965, academic (neuro science), author not previously read
- English, public library, 388 pages, 4.5 stars
- read May 9-23, 2026, book not previously read

This book arrived in my TBR after I noticed a reference to it in The WEIRDest people in the world. FWIW, some of what I think I remember Joseph Henrich attributing to Stanislas Dehaene didn't appear to be in this book.

For my next trick, I'll try to get my hands on the same author's The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics from 1997.

I'm pleased to report that this time I got behind on recording books read, it wasn't because of computer issues. First I caught a minor bug, and spent extra time in bed, often reading. Then I found a second bridge partner, and began both playing more bridge games and getting up rather too early to do so, leading to a tendency to nap - or perhaps just rest in bed with a book. I'm currently three books behind, not counting the one I just recorded above.

>154 ArlieS: That sounds really interesting about the ease of reading with Italian. It must be so much easier as it is so logical. I remember reading something about differential mathematical abilities in children who learnt numbers in different languages. It was saying that children learning very logical numerical naming systems (basically multiples of ten) learnt more quickly than children using more complex systems (eg French where ninety is four twenties and ten). Welsh has two numerical naming systems: a traditional one which is more based on 20 and is complicated to say the least (18 translates as two nines, for instance, whereas 19 is 4 plus 15). Unsurprisingly, a simplified ten based version has been created and the traditional one is mainly used only for dates now.

44. Pied Piper by Nevil Shute

This novel was written during World War II about an AFAIK imaginary incident earlier in that war, during and immediately after the fall of France. (The fall of France was June 1940; the book was published in 1942.)

We follow the adventures of an Englishman of some means, who decided to holiday in France during the Phoney War period, attempting to return home in a hurry after it heats up, with Germany attacking first Belgium and then France. He's been asked to bring two British born children with him; their father plans to stay at his job, and his wife wants to stay with him, but they'd like their children safely out of it.

This looks doable, perhaps even in comfort (first class train accommodations etc.) but one of the children becomes ill, delaying them for a crucial 2 or 3 days, and the Germans move much faster than anyone expected. Travel gets harder, with a lot of walking involved, and streams of other refugees. Meanwhile, he keeps picking up other children, either from desperate parents wanting them safe with relatives, or simply found abandoned on the way - one survives when both his parents are killed by aircraft attacking the refugee stream.

By the time they reach the coast, the Germans are in charge. They get some help from the Germans in their character of (French) refugees, seeking to take shelter with a made-up relative. But the Germans don't want anyone fleeing the country, whether by sea or by land.

To say more would be to utterly spoil the plot. But we know from the beginning that the Englishman survives, as there's a framing story - the tourist tells the story to a younger man, in London, while waiting out an air raid. So it's hardly spoiling to pass along that bit of information.

---

I read Nevil Shute's complete oeuvre when I was still in high school, and liked everything except his On the beach. In fact, I liked them enough to reread them, and eventually acquired them all.

I imagine they did a lot to shape my understanding of the experience of World War II. That war was still living memory when I was younger, but there was a lot that people didn't talk about. So a lot of my understanding would have come from fiction. There are doubtless all kinds of errors in that understanding even now - particularly the part that came from adventure stories for children (which this was not), but also even from books like this one.

But the Nevil Shute works remain a great read, and no more unrealistic than modern historical novels set in the same period, but presumably in different ways.

Statistics:
- fiction, then recent historical/adventure, non-series, 1942
- Author (Nevil Shute Norway): male, English, born in 1899, novelist and aeronautical engineer, author of many books I've read, but none in 2026 until this one.
- English, own library, 303 pages, 4 stars
- read May 25, 2026; book previously read

I reread this book because Dejah_Thoris had recalled it to mind by mentioning it in her thread, and I was having the kind of bad day where I wanted something light and predictable.

>157 ArlieS: Lovely review, Arlie.

Sometimes something light and predictable is all I want - hence my frequent rereads.

I still have several more of Shute's novels to read for the first time, and I'm looking forward to them. That is, except for On the Beach; I'm not sure I'll ever read that one.

>154 ArlieS: This sounds fascinating! I guess I'll have to add it to my wishlist. It's been dangerous on LT today; this is the fourth BB I've taken. Thanks for the good review, Arlie.

>158 Dejah_Thoris: Enjoy! I've liked all but that one serious downer, even What happened to the Corbetts, which at the time it was written was another warning of a not-so-great future.

>159 atozgrl: I need more BBs, frankly. Today's my day to compose a pick-list for a library run next week, placing holds so the books will be brought to the branch where I'll pick them up. And my TBR isn't overlapping enough with the library's holdings.

Enjoy the book! all 4 of them, in fact.

>156 SandDune: Yikes! I'm glad I didn't have to deal with numbers like that.

45. Good reasonable people : the psychology behind America's dangerous divide by Keith Payne

This book approaches the American political divide via a mix of personal experience and research results. Although the author is a psychology professor, he doesn't focus on differences in individual psychology - he says that while there are some differences, they are small enough that they can only explain a tiny portion of the differences observed. Instead, he suggests that traits common among both sides of US politics, combined with lived experience and group identification - account for the majority of the difference.

In particular, he suggests that most Americans don't have a consistent political philosophy. Academics and political professionals may have such a philosophy, but the average person approaches many questions in an ad hoc way, giving different responses to the same question at different times. Thus, my friend the minarchist libertarian is relatively unusual - most would answer relevant questions based on context - thus "government should have less power" when they are thinking about some government action they don't like, and "more power", when they are thinking of something it could then do that they want. The same applies almost across the board - except on questions involving race; in that area, many Americans have consistent beliefs and political preferences. In other areas, they mostly don't even remember how they answered last year, believing instead that they answered the same way they are answering today,

He also has a lot to say about the way humans evaluate information, and pick their (sometimes merely momentary) beliefs based on whatever allows them to see themselves as "good, reasonable people".

I found the information about changeable, inconsistent preferences interesting. It was also interesting to see how little of politics is explained by (now) common sense intuitions about personality traits.

I also enjoyed the anecdata about the author, growing up in the kind of family circumstances that produce right wing Americans, but going to college, becoming a professor, and moving left wing, like many of his new peers. (He even cites evidence that college roommates tend to move closer to each other in political preference while rooming together.) And his extended family's handling of their internal political disagreement seems sane.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, psychology, series: n/a, 2024,
- Author (Keith Payne): male, English, age unknown, academic (psychology), author read once before (in 2020)
- English, public library, 245 pages, 4 stars
- read May 18-26, 2026, book not previously read

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

46. The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World by Hal Brands

This book of history and geopolitics started off interesting, with ideas new to me - and finished as a candidate for a yeeted DNF. After struggling to the end, I averaged the two impressions, and rated it at 3.

It starts by discussing a theory of geopolitics originated by Halford Mackinder in 1904. The author of this book basically subscribes to that theory, with more recent updates; I had never heard of it before.

This book essentially traces out the workings of that theory in the conflicts and alliances of the twentieth century, with emphasis on Eurasia.

So far so good. But as we get closer to the present, it becomes clear that Brands believes there are two types of nation in the world: good, democratic ones and evil autocratic ones. The US and its erstwhile allies (since alienated by Trump) are defined as good, and most of the rest as evil. The good democracies may have to compromise with evil in pursuit of realpolitik, but that's OK. On the other hand, having anything but the good ones in charge of the world would be catastrophic. And since the decline of the British Empire at the century's start, this means the United States in particular.

None of this is stated in so many words, let alone supported by argument. It's merely implicit in far too many of the author's statements. Democracies like the US, with its very checkered history, and its current plutocratic regime, are good by definition. Other nations may call themselves democracies, and have their own elections and similar - but they are really tyrannies, unless part of the "democratic" club, whose membership is never quite stated.

I'm willing to accept this sort of thing when discussing e.g. World War II, and perhaps even the Cold War. Yeah, there's over-simplification, but we're discussing the past, so the moral status is "is" rather than "should". And certainly some largish quantity of people at the time believed such things.

But the nearer we get to the present, let alone the future, the more I react to the author as a blinkered idiot, who basically favors the US - and whoever it favors - because he is American himself - and then has the gall to say he's favoring it not because it's his "us", but because it has some special moral virtue.

Tell that to black slaves and their descendants. Tell that to Native Americans. Tell it to the Puerto Ricans, who fought not to be annexed by the US, and are still in a semi-citizen limbo. Tell that to all the foreign victims of American self-interest, particularly those whose democratically elected governments were overthrown in CIA-backed coups.

I do not think the United States is uniquely bad. But it sure isn't uniquely good either. I doubt that anyone with this kind of blinkered viewpoint can truly understand geopolitics.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history and geopolitics, series: n/a, 2025
- Author (Hal Brands): male, American, born in 1983, academic (global affairs) and columnist, author not previously read
- English, public library, 296 pages, 3 stars
- read May 12-26, 2026, book not previously read

47. A splendid exchange : how trade shaped the world by William J. Bernstein

This is a book of vignettes in the history of trade. It can't cover the entire history, which would be huge, so it includes a selection of bits of history, from trade in Sumer to the protests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.

I think there's a point being made by the selection, but it's not explicit. Probably the point is something like "trade is a good thing," in spite of cases where it's not (epidemics spread by trade, in chapter 6) or is loudly unappreciated (protectionist movements, many reactions to globalization).

There's also a reasonable amount of economics and economic theory included in this history. Chapter 13, titled "Collapse", has a lot to say the Stolper-Samuelson hypothesis, about who gains and who loses from free(r) trade, and hence who is likely to oppose it. (The author clearly favors it, in general, though he does talk about the desirability of compensating some of the victims, if only to avoid political instability - riots about free trade aren't even good for those who otherwise benefit from that trade.)

I read this book in small chunks, interrupted by other reading. That may be why it feels disjointed to me. Or maybe it simply is disjointed, stringing things together - history in the beginning; modern politics nearer the end - that don't entirely go together.

Overall it's OK, and taught me a bit of economic theory I hadn't known before. But I can't get excited about it. Rated 3.5.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2008
- Author (William J. Bernstein): male, American, born in 1948, financial theorist and neurologist, , author not previously read
- English, public library, 467 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Apr 29-May 31, 2026, book not previously read

This book got into my TBR via a mention in The Plague Cycle: the Unending War ....

>164 ArlieS: I think it can be agreed that trade is a good thing but it is also a thing often that has been used by the strong at the expense of the weak. I am reading Eduardo Galeano's excellent book on the history and suffering of Latin America, The Open Veins of Latin America which details how the rich countries have traded the raw materials of the third world and made this very trade the tool to suppress and impoverish them.

>165 PaulCranswick: Yeah. I mistrust anyone who thinks that *anything* is an unalloyed good. At best, they are callow, hopefully from youth.

And it seems to be part of the human condition that just about anything can and will be used by some (stronger) people to make themselves even stronger at the expense of those already weaker.

On a good day, I remember there's good mixed in with the bad, sometimes in far more generous proportions.

48. Round the Bend by Nevil Shute

This novel is one of many I read in high school and/or university, and haven't revisited since. I acquired the whole set a few years ago, so now can conveniently reread them.

I cannot discuss this one without a whole mess of spoilers, and won't even try. Outside the spoilers: I like it, but would have preferred a different ending. And there's no end of room for criticism of the author's advanced-for-his-time social context, 75 years after it was published.

I remembered this book primarily as being about a man who'd caught the aviation bug as a boy, apprenticed as an airplane mechanic, learned to fly, and who went out to the Middle East after World War II with a single small airplane and started a charter service, which prospered. In retrospect, this seems to me have been set in the glory days of flight, when a skilled but working class young man could be successful founding his own aviation business. This and other books like it by the same author may have prepared me for my own career in software engineering, at a time when software development was at much the same stage.

In fact, while the narrator is indeed the aviation entrepreneur I remembered, his story is really a frame for the novel's real story, about the narrator's old friend (from his first aviation job, as a boy) who becomes his chief mechanic - and a successful religious leader, so successful as to be compared with Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed et al.. The narrator is a somewhat uncomprehending observer, who sees his friend/employee as a bit dotty about religion, but harmless, and an excellent mechanic and teacher of other mechanics.

There's also much concern - and a social message - about "Asiatics", as compared with white people. The chief mechanic is half Chinese and half Russian. The chief pilot is a Sikh. In fact, every single employee of this airline is some kind of non-white easterner. They are all paid notably less than a white person would be paid for the same job, and it's not just a matter of paying local rates - (white) pilots who apply to the airline expect to be paid notably more. This is, moreover, the "secret sauce" that allows the airline to gain business - they can charge less than potential competitors. All this is explicit, and presented as basically positive. The narrator/business owner is presented as unusual among white people, for seeing Asiatics as being people.

For 1951, this is an anti-racist message, and perhaps even an anti-colonialist one. In 2026, it rather sets one's teeth on edge, unless one can suspend modern understanding as part of suspending disbelief.

It's also explicit that the religious message works almost entirely for Asiatics, particularly the airline people among them, who'd be seen - and see themselves as elite. Asiatics, it seems, need religion, and if they are taught Western secular ways they become un-moored, leading to sloppy work and similar. Whatever their religion, they need to put time and attention into it, and the religious leader character inspires them to do so, even with an explicit message of good work as being part of godliness.

Finally, there's some amount of persecution and tragedy. The religious leader dies young, after a bit more than 4 years teaching (as prophesied) - though from leukemia, not persecution. His sister gives up her hope of married happiness (what else would a woman want?!) lest her being ordinary have a negative effect on his memory. She retires to work with orphans in a Catholic establishment, telling her gentleman friend not to visit or contact her. This gentleman friend is the narrator/entrepreneur, who then settles down to provide the best possible fares to pilgrims visiting sites associated with the deceased religious leader, giving up his dream of marriage, and living in a softer, gentler terrain than the Middle East. This is presumably because the author's idea of religion requires bad things happening to its role models; he was presumably raised Christian, like his narrator. Or perhaps it's because he expects his readers to have this expectation/requirement of any true religious leader. (Note that Mohammed and Buddha lived normal lifespans, and Mohammed married and had children. So this is a very Western/Christian assumption.)

Net result: I can no longer read this as light fiction, without these other concerns intruding.

Statistics:
- fiction, spec fic. at the time, non-series, 1951
- Author (Nevil Shute Norway): male, English, born in 1899, novelist and aeronautical engineer, author of my #44 for 2026
- English, own library, 375 pages, 3.5 stars
- read May 31-June 2, 2026; book previously read

49. The price of victory : a naval history of Britain, 1815-1945 by N. A. M. Rodger

This is the third of three volumes of A naval History of Britain. Contrary to my usual practice, I decided to start with the third and final volume, rather than beginning at the beginning, probably because I'd encountered the third volume in some bibliography.

It was very informative, but I lacked quite enough background for things to stick. This was not helped by the book's organization, with chapters on government and administration, policy and operations, ships and weapons, and social history interleaved in only roughly chronological order. It also wasn't helped by reading multiple other books concurrently.

This third volume is as much a history of the British navy as a naval history of Britain. It's full of detail about recruitment and training, particularly of officers-to-be. We learn about the political levels of control of the navy. We learn about various types of technical ratings, and how the specialties changed over time. And we learn about ship design, in this period that transitions from wooden sailing ships to metal ships with internal combustion engines.

One thing struck me strongly early on: the author represents the navy as being politics-ridden, disorganized, and frequently inept. (A rather ruder word came to mind as I typed this.) This was not the impression I had previously had of the British Senior Service.

All was explained when I got to the period of World War II, where the author manages to describe the French, Italian, German and American navies in similar uncomplimentary terms. He likes pointing out the effects of human frailty, particular when that frailty is found in high places - from ship officers all the way up to heads of state, but with emphasis on admirals and government ministers with naval responsibilities. He also loves pointing out mistakes made because of lack of information - some the normal result of fog of war, and some the result of sticking fingers in one's ears and going "la, la, la".

All these navies had too many admirals more interested in rivalries with other admirals or other services than in doing the right thing for their country. All had high ranking idiots with idées fixées that they imposed in spite of evidence. And Rodgers loves pointing out their deficiencies, even more than cases where people did their jobs effectively and well.

Britain was not unique; indeed the author seems to reserve more scorn for the Italians and the Americans.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, history, series: n/a, 2024
- Author (Nicholas Andrew Martin Rodger): male, British, born in 1949, academic historian (second career), author not previously read
- English, public library, 934 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Apr 7-June 18, 2026, book not previously read

I don't recall for sure how this book got into my TBR, but suspect it came from the bibliography of either Seapower States or No More Napoleons, both of which I read earlier this year.

50. Secular cycles by Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov

This is Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War: the life cycles of imperial nations with more statistics, though not much of the expected math.

I read it because War and Peace and War was interesting, but lacked the math needed to make their theory more than a just-so story. This book was one of two referenced as covering the same topic, but with the math. In fact, it had more statistics, many of them best-estimates-under-uncertainty, or recorded data believed to be strongly correlated with the data they'd have preferred to use, if only it had been recorded.

Both books promulgate much the same theory of history of agrarian (pre-Industrial Revolution) polities, using case studies of a different list of examples. War and Peace and... has extra theoretical features but is aimed at math-shy, statistics-shy laypeople. Secular cycles is aimed at a more math-and-data loving reader.

I remain only partly convinced by the theory. There are so few examples (8 in this book), and the theory was formulated after examining the examples - it is, after all, history, not experimental science. But that means it simply cannot be as reliable as other types of theories.

That said, descriptions of the stagnant and down turning portions of the agrarian cycle remind me a lot of current events. We, too, have too many ordinary worker types, such that their wages and working conditions can be forced down for the benefit of elites. Things are kind of good for elite individuals, but not entirely - we've produced too many of them, so they are competing with each other for whatever "surplus" production they can squeeze from ordinary workers. Surplus members of the elite are falling down to merely normal stature.

This is just one stage of the agrarian cycle, but it feels so very familiar.

Of course the difference between now and then is that in the developed world we're not overpopulated to the point of insufficient food. Our farming tech is just that much better, so we're staying ahead so far. We are short on _jobs_, and those that exist for non-elites are increasingly precarious, low paid, and generally nasty, compared with e.g. the 1950s (for whites at least). But we're not going hungry, not dying off in epidemics, not being executed in job lots by paranoid rulers, or killing each other off in civil wars. That is an improvement, much as I'd prefer more _good_ jobs, and a decent share of productivity gains going to the workers.

But that's only me connecting dots that seem clear to me. The book is strictly pre-industrial revolution, where the non-elites are mostly peasants, and the elites mostly land owners.

At any rate, an interesting book and a perhaps useful model, but don't forget to add a shaker of saly.

Statistics:
- non-fiction, historical theory, series: n/a, 2009
- Author (Peter Turchin): male, Russian-American, born in 1957, academic (ecology, evolutionary biology, and math), author of my #33 for this year
- Author (Sergey Aleksandrovich Nefedov): male, Russian, born in 1951, academic (history), author not previously read
- English, inter-library loan, 349 pages, 4 stars
- read June 7-20, 2026, book not previously read

I read this because i wanted the data and maths left out of _War and Peace and..._

>168 ArlieS: Well done getting through that one, Arlie. I would have thought that 934 pages of naval history was something of a trudge!

>170 PaulCranswick: I enjoyed it. But I'll read almost anything that teaches me something new.

I am so far behind on everyone else's thread that it's insane, and reading only 2 or 3 days a week rather than all 7. But I'm playing a lot of bridge, and getting various things accomplished, often involving either home improvements or computers. I think my energy level, or at least my ambition, has recovered from chemo at last, though I tire more easily than I remember doing in the before times.

Today is a typical example. Multiple errands, including a ridiculous snafu involving my cell phone provider and my new phone, which took hour(s) to resolve, counting two in person visits to addresses claimed to have one of their store fronts, which in fact had competitors. The web site had told me to deal with my problems at one of their stores. When I finally found a store that still existed, the clerk there determined my mess needed to be resolved by phone, so I called from in the store, with the helpful clerk doing most of the communication for me. It was also hot enough to be tiring, even though I mostly went from A/C to A/C. (It was not however anywhere near as hot as it's been in the UK recently/currently.) Net result, when I got home, I napped.

By the way, the only reason I can think of to use AT&T wireless after this experience is their excellent senior citizen discount. Their website is a mess; they can't keep their list of storefronts up to date; you can't call a store to talk to a human directly - you get intercepted by a phone bot that won't accept "I want to know if the store actually exists" as a reason for calling, and moving service from one phone to another was incredibly difficult. And they can't seem to handle e-sims at all, whatever their web site claims; I wound up with a physical sim. In 2026. If you aren't old enough for the discount, run screaming!

Today's "fun" was, of course, a consequence of finally replacing my elderly cell phone. And I'm actively looking at bids to install a solar panel plus battery system at my house. No guilt if I run the A/C every day all summer. And much much less vulnerability to the local utility's ridiculous blackouts. But the research is a giant time sink. If I hadn't been so exhausted after errands, I'd have been emailing bidders with requests and questions, rather than napping, but my brain just wasn't on line enough.

I have two beautiful inter-library loan books waiting for me, as well as one local library book I've already started, but don't think I read at all yesterday; certainly not today. And right now I'm going to instead review the book I most recently finished, as there are two readers with holds on it who'd doubtless be overjoyed if I returned it early.

51. Platform Decay by Martha Wells

This is the 8th volume in The Murderbot Diaries. This series involves a cyborg "security bot", created to serve their owners in often lethal ways, who hacked their controller, achieving internal freedom, and eventually became fully independent, passing as an augmented human security consultant.

They've acquired friends along the way, some equally unpopular with certain corporate interests. In particular, members of a human friend and patron's family have been quasi-legally kidnapped, having made the mistake of traveling on corporate-controlled transport.

The cyborg, who knows themselves as "Murderbot" and some other mostly not fully human friends have taken on the mission of rescuing them. 244 pages of action, wry humor, and emotional interaction ensure.

As always for this series, the first person protagonist voice is hilarious. But some of the delightful edge is gone - it's now more like routine mission and travelogue, less uniquely surprising. Hence my rating of 3.5, rather than the 4s and 4.5s I've given most earlier volumes of the series.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2026
- Author (Martha Wells): female, American, born 1964, novelist, author last read in 2023
- English, local library, 244 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Jun 23-28, 2026, book not previously read

This author is read-on-sight for me, as is this series.

>172 ArlieS: Good grief!! That sounds like a terribly frustrating day!! I hope today is going better.

>174 RebaRelishesReading: So far so good. Only one serious errand, and it should be routine.

52. Behind the throne by K. B. Wagers

This novel is a good example of intrigue and violence in a far future universe, where a human diaspora has created planets with interesting cultural choices, adding colour to the resulting stories.

In this case, we have a planet with its predominant cultural influences from India, with a female supremacist culture, and a constitutional monarchy where the Empress and what amounts to the upper house (the matriarchs) have more power than moderns are used to, while the representatives of the common people have rather less. (They have a commoner prime minister, but his functions appear to be mostly ceremonial. I'm not actually sure there's a lower house behind him.)

This is merely the setting for a story of treason. Some group or groups has been murdering the royal family one by one. The Empress is alive but dying. One daughter survives - the unsuitable one who'd left the planet - and the empire - when still fairly young, and made a life for herself as an arms smuggler. We see the story from the daughter's viewpoint, summoned home somewhat forcefully, grieving for her recently deceased siblings, to a fraught relationship with her mother, as well as a number of attempts to assassinate her (the daughter) as well.

I won't say more about the plot, beyond what was obvious from the blurb and the first chapter, not wanting to spoil the story.

The characters are fun, especially the heroine. I'm not sure everything goes together perfectly, but it's a workable read, and I devoured the book in 3 days flat, ignoring other reading.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, first of a series, 2016
- Author (K. B. Wagers): non-binary, American, age unknown, novelist, author not previously read
- English, local library, 424 pages, 3.5 stars
- read Jul 3-5, 2026, book not previously read

I read this book because Dejah_Thoris hit me with a book bullet. I plan to follow up by reading the next 2 in this series, which my local library has, and then deciding whether to seek farther afield for the remaining 3 books of the series, or other books by this author.

53. After the crown by K. B. Wagers

This is the sequel to my #52 for this year. It continues to provide a steady dose of violence and intrigue, tempered with self-doubt from the heroine and suicidal loyalty from her followers. But the overall story, particularly the characters begins to threaten suspension of disbelief.

This will get worse in the third volume, which I've already started, and it's somewhat difficult for me to remember exactly when certain flaws become too obvious to me to ignore. Suffice it to say that with the 3rd volume now 3/4 completed, I don't question why my local library neglected to acquire any of the later volumes, and won't be making an attempt to find them at other libraries.

The other problem is that the uniqueness of the society is fading. The first book started with an interesting premise, sure to create social tensions. In particular, the society was matriarchal, with enough discrimination against males to provoke not just a liberation movement, but one with a terrorist sub-group. This implies something much worse than the status of women in e.g. 1950s Canada, where I was born. But the second and third volumes are full of men with responsible jobs (admiral, doctor, etc.) being treated as peers by women in similar roles. There are complaints of slower promotion, and the society still reserves some political rights to elite women - officially as well as in practice. This is not bad enough to provoke terrorism, political violence, and similar. It's also becoming boringly similar to every other society of space faring humans, losing all kinds of individual touches. (In volume 1, the cultural descent from Indian sources mattered, as did the dominant religion. That does not last.)

It's still great as a light weight heroic violence fix, complete with a heroine who's super-humanly lucky, as well as kick ass beyond even the fantasies of even the average jock. It can be read comfortably in that mode. Just don't expect an interesting backdrop, or even believable characters.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2016
- Author (K. B. Wagers): non-binary, American, age unknown, novelist, author of my #52 for 2026
- English, local library, 402 pages, 3 stars
- read Jul 11-12, 2026, book not previously read

54. Beyond the empire by K. B. Wagers

This is the third in The Indranan Wars series, following my #52 and #54 for this year. It's also the book that soured me on its author.

It continued to provide a steady dose of violence and intrigue, tempered with self-doubt from the heroine and suicidal loyalty from her followers. Unfortunately the heroine, supposedly an Empress, though with parts of her territory in revolt, continues to act like a loose cannon dedicated to personally participating in violence better handled by subordinates. Moreover, her relations with subordinates are mostly with personal acquaintances - more than surprising in an empire composed of enough star systems that only a few are even named. My suspension of disbelief crashed hard.

Add to this her tendency to flout her own law, including personally executing a traitor already in custody, who should have been handled by the local equivalent of a court martial. At the same time, she suppresses material information about the motives for the treason, to avoid revealing that one of her noble officers was cheating on his wife. (The officer was killed by their enemies as a result of his paramour revealing his mission to them - she'd believed the Empress would be on that mission rather than him.)

This author would do just fine if she made her heroine a leading member of a hereditary criminal organization. Her personal participation in violence would be far more plausible, if unwise. And some such organization(s) might well have the same fanatic loyalty to their leader(s) that I find hard to believe from an Empress' subjects.

I rated this book at 3 rather than 2.5 only because I know why I finished the book - as a story of violent conflict, it worked for me. Not recommended.

Statistics:
- fiction, science fiction, series (not first), 2017
- Author (K. B. Wagers): non-binary, American, age unknown, novelist, author of my #52 and #53 for 2026
- English, local library, 401 pages, 3 stars
- read Jul 12-14, 2026, book not previously read