The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
I think my threshold for good fantasy varies wildly from book to book, season to season. At times it is a comfort food, and seeking comfort and ease I find it and look no further - while at times I...
2010s
Wellness
A double-negative in a sentence performs in my mind a kind of fascinating transformation of meaning; ostensibly the sentence works just the same without it, but practically there is something else, a différance that drives the meaning around and into...
A Gentleman In Moscow
It is a bit suspicious that this was published after Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, but as much of a Anderson fanboy as I am, I think this may have done it better. Declining customs of an...
Into The Silence
Impressive, compelling and detailed story of a bunch of crazy Britishers, gallivanting through life, clinging to the glory of a bygone era, callously causing wanton death and performing feats of greatness. It is astonishing their arrogance, what they lived through,...
The Rise And Fall Of The Dinosaurs
Brusatte takes you through an excellent history of both the dinosaurs themselves and the field of paleontology, from a few crazy pioneers (I could stand to learn a bit more about Baron Nopsca, scientist, swashbuckler and spy) to the high-tech...
China In Ten Words
I worry sometimes about my Education. I always thought it was like, pretty good, I got good grades in a wide variety of subjects, but then something like The Cultural Revolution comes to the fore and I am just astonishingly...
Braiding Sweetgrass
Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of the Creation.
Debt
I was, to be frank, prepared to be bored by this - “debt” is a dry, intuitive concept which seemed little deserving of 500 pages of exegesis. The book seemed vaguely Important and not a bit hip, but not…interesting. Then...
Lightning Rods
The Stone Sky