321–330 of 651 posts
It's decent albeit old-fashioned. I think it would be better to use this accompanied by LLPSI.
The final section of The Baroque Cycle. Clever, detailed historical fiction epic about the 1600s and 1700s in Europe, The Middle East, and a bit of North Americas east coast. Interactions between fictional and real characters, without anything that can be proved didn't happen (like The Thee Musketeers). And, just a hint of magic. See Isaac Newton as a precocious Cambridge student probing the universe by maneuvering a…
(I) think of the baroque cycle as fictionalized history rather than historical fiction
Such a marvelous trilogy.
Fiction: "The Lies of Locke Lamora" I found this book because I just finished playing Dishonored 2 and I wanted to read a book with a dystopian steampunk alternative-Victorian vibe. The events take place in a gritty, corrupt city of waterways and canals controlled by different factions. The factions represent either the legitimate nobility or the extensive underground criminal empire. A charismatic leader of a small…
Life in London, or the day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom in their rambles and sprees through the Metropolis by Pierce Egan. I read this book for the second time this year, the two hundredth anniversary of its publication. It was a bestseller in the nineteenth century and led to many spinoffs, but nobody seems to read it anymore. A scan of an 1869 reprint is at [1]. Th…
If you’ve never read Three Men in a Boat or Tristram Shandy you might try those too.
438 days. A memoir of a Mexican fisherman that spent over a year drifting across the Pacific Ocean. I’m a sucker for a good survival story and finished it in a day.
The latter is one of the few books I read thrice over the years. Combines for me beauty, survival, appreciation for life and our humanness, philosophy and knowledge about our world.
It is a long history of all the effects of monetary policy. And how Bitcoin could change the world in this regard.
I read Sapiens by Yuval Harari this year. It was long and fascinating, incredibly well researched, and easy enough for "light reading" that I had time for between writing research papers. A couple things that stuck with me were stories of giant land mammals that used to exist, many more than I realized, alongside humans. Wherever humans colonized, the large mammals were killed off soon after. This happened in Austral…
This year I read Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber and David Wengrow [0]. And found it much more nuanced, interesting and believable. Harari's narrative is just too slick.