Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?

Clickable links:

[1]: https://stallman.org/Bob-Chassell

• Lush Life, a biography of Billy Strayhorn, a jazz composer for Duke Ellington.

• Fashion Climbing: A Memoir, an autobiography of Bill Cunningham who you might know from the street style photography he did for the NYT.

• Kings of their Own Ocean, a non-fiction history of Bluefin Tuna fishing.

Kind of off-path from my regular reading, but I recently got absorbed into the planted aquarium world. This book was such a great way to get acquainted with the ecology and methods required, though once you do it... It's extremely obvious that it works, and why it works:

Ecology of the Planted Aquarium: A Practical Manual and Scientific Treatise https://www.amazon.ca/Ecology-Planted-Aquarium-Practical-Sci...

Having a slice of nature in my home that's genuinely self-sufficient by all practical means has been wildly educational, rewarding, and fascinating. So many species emerged from such small samples of local ponds, lakes, and streams where I found my materials. I thought I understood ecological diversity and the staggering number of living things out there, but seeing this thriving ecosystem in only 10 gallons of volume really drove it home... The earth is absolutely covered in life.

And it all came out of mud!

I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to nerd out on ecology, aquariums, water, etc.

Just finished Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street (1873). Bagehot was the editor of The Economist in the 1860s and 1870s. This book sketches out London's banking and finance system and, particularly, how liquidity crises are handled.

https://archive.org/details/lombardstreetad00bagegoog/page/n...

The Water Knife. ISBN 978-0-385-35287-1

Dystopian-future novel with a backdrop of water scarcity in the western United States. A "water knife" is a name for a security contractor who enforces water rights...