Categories
Review

“Persians”

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

I continue my slow procession eastward in my reading of history!

The core concept of this book was, really, “hey, you: most of what you know about Persia was written by the Greeks, who were writing it as anti-Persian propaganda. Let’s talk about the Persian Version of history.” And, for the most part, it sticks with that — there’s a few places where what’s available gets a bit thin, as the Persian Empire didn’t really do written records of history, they went in for the oral tradition, which… doesn’t survive well, after that many centuries. Whereas the Greeks sure liked writing down their stories, and hey presto, we’ve been basing our entire shared background knowledge of an ancient culture on… someone using them as a definitive Other around which to construct a shared identity. Not great, Bob!

As per usual with my reading of history, I don’t really expect to retain a whole lot of detail, I’m just trying to fill in enough that I’ll have some vague knowledge to get me started if I want to dive deep again later. As such, the middle section, where the author pauses the actual “and so-and-so did such-and-such thing” history bits and instead devotes a fair chunk of time to just talking about how the Persian Empire worked, how people lived, was my favorite. That’s what I wanted from the history book! I wanted to know what my fellow, like, mid-level bureaucrats were doing; that’s the lifestyle I occupy now, and it’s the one that’ll be the most directly comparable for me mentally then.

Overall, a good read; occasionally in danger of getting a bit too dry, but Llewellyn-Jones managed to balance that out with the occasional flash of that characteristically British dry humor, which somehow cancels out any dryness in prose. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Diamond Age”

Neal Stephenson

All the discussion of nanotechnology in Chip War made me want to reread this book, so here I am! I have, in point of fact, done something of a review of it before, but as that was over a decade ago, I figure it’s probably okay for me to take another pass.1

I’ve always thought of this as being set in the near future, but there’s actually no indication that’s the case, and some indications that it’s not. The bit where an elderly lady reminisces about having been a Cool Teen during the age of Snow Crash, which is set in (a very 1980s-flavored) near future, would indicate that it’s closer to a century out. Slightly disappointing for my hopes of seeing this level of post-scarcity reasonably-safe nanotech within my lifetime, I must say.

Diamond Age is the book that ruined 3D printing for me. I simply cannot be satisfied with a version of the technology that can produce plastic tchotchkes when what I’m envisioning is a device that can lay down individual atoms, assembling molecules from the ground-up to produce anything from a swarm of cancer-eating nanobots to a perfectly-nutritionally-balanced meal to a new mattress. But sure, making replacement parts for your kid’s dollhouse is cool or whatever, I guess.

The plot of the book remains a wonderful sprawling thing, something like twenty years in duration. This reread I found myself being more critical of the aspects of a ‘white savior’ arc going on with regards to one of the characters, but I may just have to file that as being the sort of thing that we simply weren’t concerned by at the time it was written. The overall theme, though, still works: this is, really, a book about growing up, and about parenting your child. Or someone else’s child that you’ve become an adoptive parent to. Or an entire generation of children.

And it’s also about cultures. I quite like the way Stephenson approaches cultures and subcultures; it’s also a key element in Snow Crash.2 In both cases, the setting he has created allows for more freedom of movement between cultures, and reduces the impact of birthplace in cultural development. Basically, he’s saying, what happens if your identity is tied less to where you’re from than it is to what you value? What happens when people can form interest groups in the way that was first truly allowed by the internet, and then we turn that freedom of association up to eleven? Imagine pseudo-countries, little enclaves worldwide where all the people with one set of values — Victorian-esque politeness and stoicism, to pick a non-random example — gather themselves together. That’s the world of Diamond Age, the world that Snow Crash portrays taking shape.

It’s an interesting concept, for sure! I don’t think we’re quite on track for things to go that way, but it’s a valuable thought experiment either way, and one I really enjoy reading every time.

Summing up: The Diamond Age holds up well ten years later, and I still recommend it. It’s a great piece of science fiction. Check it out!3

  1. Note the first: That post went up ten years and a day before I started writing this one, which is a delightful coincidence.
    Note the second: that’s not even the oldest post remaining available on this blog, much less the oldest one that remains in the visible-only-to-me part of the archives. It’s very weird to have been doing this “writing stuff on the internet” thing for that long. ↩
  2. Which I will likely be doing a similar review for soon; books prompt me to read other books, and this one was prompted by one book club and wound up prompting the other book club. Fun! ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying”

Django Wexler

I don’t know how I feel about the realization that I’ve read enough isekais to think “this is the best isekai I’ve ever read” and have that be a somewhat meaningful distinction, but here I am.

This was an absolute delight of a book. The use of footnotes hit right in the “it’s been a while since I read any Terry Pratchett” part of my brain, while the first-person narrator was wonderfully chaotic.

The isekai part of the story had a fun twist: not only is she in this fantasy world, destined to save the kingdom or whatever, but she also can’t screw it up—because if she dies, she gets reset back to having just been summoned by the wizard. With her memories intact. The incitement for the story, then, is that she has been stuck in a variable-length time loop for over a thousand years of subjective time, she can play the plotline like a fiddle, she’s memorized everyone’s responses so well that her life is like watching a speed-runner compete. And she is bored, and decides to try something new: can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

Such a fun read, very well-targeted at my interests. I have a single quibble, and it’s the variable amount of memory of “vaguely 21st century culture” stuff she remembers—it was, I reiterate, a thousand years ago for her. On the other hand, I could probably chalk that up to “it’s been translated from Fantasy World Language, with cultural references added for flavor” and call it good. Definitely not worth avoiding the book; like I said, a delightful read, I heartily recommend it. Check it out!1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Chip War”

Chris Miller

I wound up with pages and pages of notes to discuss this book during the actual book club session, but I think I’m going to keep this review short — in no small part because I’m tagging it geopolitics, and as I’m writing this in February of 2025 to be posted roughly a year later, anything I have to say about that is likely to have aged.

The history components were interesting; I knew the very broad strokes of the foundation of Silicon Valley, but I’m so used to the current “it’s all manufactured in Asia” state of affairs that I’d honestly lost track of the fact that it’s Silicon Valley because they manufactured silicon chips there originally. My other “no duh” moment was the realization that of course TSMC was founded with massive support from the Taiwanese government. It’s in the name, Grey. Keep up.

Other than those bits, the thing that most stuck with me was the actual technology of lithography, and exactly how ridiculous it has gotten. It’s extreme-ultraviolet lithography because the light waves in the visual spectrum were bigger than the transistors they need to print. The mirrors are so smooth that, if you scaled them up to the size of Germany, their largest imperfections would be a millimeter or so—and the targeting systems built for those mirrors are so precise that they could target a golf ball on the moon. And, lastly, the cooling fans for the lasers need to spin so fast that ball bearings were too much friction, so they are maglev fans. No wonder those EUV machines cost half a billion dollars each.

Overall: an interesting read, though already feeling a bit dated; by the time you’re reading this, it’ll probably be a bit more dated, but the background remains useful. Worth a read.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: February 2026

A short month, and a playlist with fewer additions than last month had; these things are correlated. You can listen to the whole thing, or see below for commentary.

Categories
Review

“Bookshops & Bonedust”

Travis Baldree

Once again, I went in a little doubtful – this time, because I was so happy with Legends & Lattes that the idea of a prequel sat a little off with me. I wanted to see more of the same, the characters I already knew, what their futures held. And yes, there’s a bit of that in the epilogue – and what I devoutly hope is a good hint towards what the sequel will cover – but this was mostly about Viv’s origins.

And, in true cozy fantasy style, it was mostly mostly about people being kind and helping each other out and making a nice place together. And where Legends & Lattes made me want to find a regular coffee shop to hang out in, Bookshops & Bonedust brought my childhood dream of opening a book store roaring back to life. There’s a retail space on the ground floor of my apartment building that hasn’t been occupied in the entire time I’ve lived here, and that feels a little too tempting right now…

These two books feel like Baldree has really nailed a target demographic. People like to curl up with a good book, feel warm and safe, and that’s what he gives us. Warmth, safety, and the feeling that we’re part of a little something, a community, and the space that a community builds together. Absolutely wonderful to read, I heartily recommend this one as well. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Good Enough Job”

Simone Stolzoff

A whole lot of this book I found myself nodding along with like “yep, yep.” Specifically in the way of, these are things I’ve thought for quite a while, just put together into a single narrative, rather than my usual approach to it of “one idea bubbles up, a few weeks or months later another one does.” I have, as it turns out, done a pretty reasonable job of building up a work/life balance for myself! 🎉

That said, I still found it a useful read; going through things like that, where it’s been put together into a single coherent flow, is useful to help one’s own thoughts coalesce.

Past that, there’s also some new things in there! I actually quite liked, from the very end, this call to action:

What we often lack—both as individuals and as a society—is the ability to imagine a less work-centric existence. So my question for you, dear reader, is: What’s one small change you can make to elevate your nonwork self? Perhaps you schedule a weekly walk with your best friend. Maybe you get involved in a neighborhood group where no one has any idea how you make a living. Maybe you pick up a new hobby without the expectation of mastering it. What can you do to remind yourself that you exist on this earth to do more than produce economic value?

Because, yes, I read through this whole thing and thought to myself “yeah, I should think about that a bit more,” but that’s an Ivory Tower sort of thought. It’s a thing I think while I’m already thinking about the shape of my life. It’s harder to put that sort of thing into action. This idea, though, of making one small change? That’s a great way to approach it.

An excellent read overall, well worth it; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Glamorous Notions”

Megan Chance

I’m of at least two minds about this book; it was fun, in parts, and an interesting look at mid-century Hollywood. Being not only from the perspective of a woman, but the perspective of someone who wasn’t an actress, definitely added to the whole experience – the costume designer isn’t someone I’ve thought much about in the past, much less the politics of being a costume designer. And on that count, this book was an absolute win!

On the other hand, I found myself rather irritable with the main character at many points. I had to remind myself that she didn’t grow up with the same media diet I did, but even through that thought, it felt like she maintained too much naïveté for too long. Maybe it was a deliberate refusal to see what was going on? I suppose there was a bit of her not quite realizing she was falling in love with a woman, and that sort of confused tangle of emotions can get one to a whole lot of We’re Just Not Thinking About What’s Going On Here, but still. The back half of the book was her trying to clean up the mess she’d gotten into, and I didn’t have nearly as much sympathy as I could’ve.

Still, it was a fun read, so give it a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Omnitopia Dawn”

Diane Duane

Not a first-time read, but apparently I’ve never written up a review, so I’m finishing up a comfort-reread by talking up this book that I really enjoy.

The general setting here is a vague “near-future” kind of thing; having been published in 2010 or so, I think it’s pegged as being approximately 2015, but the technology is all vague enough that it still works as “vaguely near-future.” It’s recognizable concepts – we all get the idea of video games, of massively-multiplayer games in particular, and VR. It’s just turned up a little bit; the sort of voice control that we always hoped the Siris of the world would turn out to be, VR that uses hand-wavey technology to explain how it can be a fully tactile experience, and the hilariously-named “hyperburst memory” that is never even remotely explained. It works; that’s just silly enough a name that I can totally see someone coming up with something genuinely innovative and world-changing… and then naming it that.

Past that, this absolutely feels like a book written by someone who tinkers with computers for fun sometimes. There’s enough of a grasp of the concepts, enough talking about programming and thinking about tech, to make that clear; but it’s also just as clear that Duane is a really good writer, because she’s given it all a much more visual, visceral sense. I’m more than willing to accept the hand-waving science fiction aspect, because it means I get to skip past the boring bits of debugging that I am oh-so-familiar with, and instead get to imagine a world where the tech tools are to the point that it is visually interesting.

Lastly, I like most of the characters in the book. There’s some fun interactions present between Dev, the CEO of the game company, and Delia, the reporter sent to interview him — since we’re switching back and forth between their viewpoints, we get to see her suspicion that he can’t really be like that, and then get his own perspective on the fact that, yeah, he kinda is just like that, but also a lot more of why and how he is.

Overall, I just love this book. I did mention that it’s a comfort-read, didn’t I? A book doesn’t become one of my “I’m stressed and need to wind down” go-tos by being bad. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: January 2026

Starting off the new year with a long playlist; while I didn’t quite get through my entire “music to listen to” backlog, I made significant progress. If I did new year’s resolutions, I would maybe retroactively claim “get through that backlog” as one of them.

Anyhow, you can listen to the whole playlist, or read on for some notes on various tracks. I’m still playing with the formatting of these to see what winds up being the easiest to skim through for the comments.

Categories
Review

“Emperor of Rome”

Mary Beard

My expectation here was definitely set by John Julius Norwitch’s style, where he kinda just started at the beginning and went in chronological order. Which is… an approach to talking about history. Probably the most traditional one, really.

This, however, was more willing to bounce around. There was certainly some amount of following chronology, but the chapters were each grouped by theme rather than, say, emperor. “The Emperor Abroad,” to discuss the various travels about the empire that they dead; “Face to Face” for an absolutely fascinating discussion of the art of the emperor, and the degree to which everything we have these days is the result of ancient PR campaigns.1 In general, the book isn’t about an emperor, or even a succession thereof, but about the emperor; the concept of the emperor, the office of the emperor. The continuity of imperial power.

It’s an interesting approach, and one that made the book more enjoyable to read. I’m never going to be able to keep track of the years in which things happened, the order of the emperors, any of that. But I’m going to remember that dinner parties were an effective way to express soft power, that imperial edicts were more performative than actually implemented, that politics has been politics for thousands of years. Human nature doesn’t change that much, really.

A great read overall, and an interesting approach to the broad cultural background that is the Roman Empire. Totally worth the read; check it out.2

  1. Also, some mind-blowing discussion of the amount of unofficial merch that there was for the emperor; ‘the ancient equivalent of refrigerator magnets,’ locally-made stuff that made the emperor, a distant figure even for those living in Rome itself, very clearly match the same vibe we have for the British royal family, or just random celebrities, now. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Give Her Credit”

Grace L. Williams

I’m really on a kick of “books about people building something” of late! And this one gets bonus points for being nonfiction, so the thing that got built really got built, which is even more fun.

“Give Her Credit” is a well-chosen title for a book about the opening of Women’s Bank in Denver, and the women who built it. It’s a cool piece of history, and touched on something I’d never really thought about: people, like, create banks. They aren’t all horrendously gigantic corporations that have existed since the 1800s! And, unsurprisingly for the banking industry, it’s a whole process to do.

I actually made it through this book in, basically, one sitting.1 It was pretty approachable! I was worried about how much sexism I was going to have to make my way through, because, again, this is a book about women opening a bank for women. In the 1970s. And the decades leading up to the 1970s. And boy, was there ever a lot of crap they were forced to go through, but the way the story was told managed to keep it from feeling overwhelming.

All in all, a good read about an interesting little corner of history. Worth a read; check it out.2

  1. Well, I moved from the couch to the counter so that I could eat dinner while reading, but other than that… ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“The Dark Lord’s Daughter”

Patricia C. Wrede

Oh, this book is just, chef’s kiss, exactly what I was hoping it would be. It’s the magic of Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, that delightful send-up of story tropes within the genre, but applied to isekai in the ‘fantasy world’ realm instead of the fantasy world alone.1 It also has an interesting twist on that in that it’s not just the main character who gets yoinked into Fantasy World – her mom and brother come along too, which worked really well to alleviate the underlying sense of loneliness that genre usually has.2

It also did a pretty good job at capturing that sense of building something that I love. Definitely in less detail; this is a young adult book after all, and spending several pages talking about, like, staffing logistics would’ve gone over like a lead balloon, but the amount of it that’s present felt just right.

All in all, this was a really fun book to read. My only complaint is that the note it ends on feels like the end of the pilot episode of a TV series; I want to see more of this world, learn more about how the magic works, all that.3 There’s a whole lot of threads set up that aren’t abandoned, per se, but also clearly don’t come to anything within this book. I suppose I’ll have to wait for the sequel. In the meantime, however, I absolutely recommend it; check it out.4

  1. I can’t believe I just added an “isekai” tag to my blog. ↩
  2. A lot of isekai stories seem like they’re trying to avoid addressing that, or talk up how much of a loner the protagonist was before it all happened, but that’s not less lonely. Humans are social animals! We’re meant to be part of a tribe, of a society. Slicing off someone’s entire support network all at once is gonna do some damage. ↩
  3. Particularly since the magic has some clear bridging notes to how computers work, and boy am I ever a sucker for a hard magic system that’s computer-science-flavored. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Unruly”

David Mitchell

From right at the beginning of the first chapter:

England was a word that gradually gained currency, like mansplain or staycation, and it was fully in use by the time William the Conquerer was king of it. I expect you’ve heard of him. Most people know that, in 1606, William the Conquerer (not at that point so named) won the Battle of Hastings and became king of England. When it comes to the likely readership of this book, that ‘most’ must rise to ‘all’. If there is anyone reading this book who didn’t already know that, I would love to hear from you because you are genuinely reading in a genre that was previously of no interest. You, if you exist, and I bet you don’t, are an absolute confounder of the algorithms.It would be like someone reading a biography of Elvis Presley who did not already know that he was a singer. What you are doing is probably more statistically remarkable than what William the Conquerer did. (14)

I have exciting news for the author about the level of knowledge I had about British history coming in to this book! To whit, none; I grabbed it specifically because I don’t know anything about the topic and have been wanting to learn more.

This feels very approachable and very British; it’s like Cunk on Britain in written form, and taking itself marginally more seriously. Also, notably uncensored, as the chapter on Cnut covered.1 I will admit, here at the end of the book, that I don’t know that I’ve retained much detail, but I wasn’t really expecting to — the point of reading this was that I knew nothing about British history, and wanted to have at least some broad-strokes vague ideas, not that I was trying to make a career pivot into ‘historian.’ So I think that’s alright. And I wouldn’t be a great historian, particularly British historian, as my level of attention to details like “which number Elizabeth was that” is such that I was very surprised that the book ended after Elizabeth I. It says, right on the cover, “A tale of power, glory, and gore from Arthur to Elizabeth I,” and I was still expecting it to carry on all the way up to the death of Elizabeth II. Whoops.

Anyhow, for the goal of “a broad overview and an entertaining read,” this absolutely delivered. If you’re interested, give it a go.2

  1. If you can’t guess what sorts of jokes were made throughout, I don’t know how to be more clear. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“A City on Mars”

Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith

The Weinersmiths once again knock it out of the park; they’re truly some of the best pop-science writers out there.

A City on Mars is an overview of, basically, the entire concept of “can and should we be trying to colonize Mars?” And, unlike the many, many blog posts out there where people say “yes!” and then excitedly talk about the Sabatier reaction, they spend a lot more time talking about the very real challenges. And, yes, a lot of that is the scientific — rockets are big, expensive, complicated machines! Biology is weird and we have literally no idea what happens to people if they spend as much time in microgravity as would be necessary to get to Mars, much less the amount of time they’d spend living in the lower-gravity environment of Mars (or the moon).1 But what this book touches on that I think a lot of other media on the subject ignores is the law. Like, we know Elon likes to hand-wave away regulation, and every libertarian fantasizes about living in space where there’s no government, but that’s… not actually how it works?2 Like, if you get filmed committing a murder in international waters, it’s still a murder, and you can and will be prosecuted for it, there’ll just be an awkward phase at the beginning of the trial where your lawyer argues with the prosecution about which specific jurisdiction you’re going to be tried in.

Overall, quite an interesting read; you’ll learn a lot more about international law than you probably know, and it’s a fun book all the way through. Well worth it. Check it out!3

  1. Like, maybe after two consecutive years of living in microgravity, you start aging backwards? It’s not likely, but nobody has checked. More realistically are the questions like “the thing where being in space screws up your eyes, does that keep getting worse over time? Does anything go wrong in your brain if it’s not getting pulled into shape by gravity? Can people even get pregnant in space?” Again, things that nobody has gotten around to testing. Oftentimes for good reason, but still. ↩
  2. Note: I’m writing this in early January of 2025. Elon may yet become god-emperor, in which case, my argument here is partially moot. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩