I finally read Starship Troopers and hated it. Heinlein was basically god to my family but I think he's got one, maybe two good books in him. He's just such a fascist. i reread The Forever War for the nth time to wash the taste of it out of my mouth and it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered. I think I've read all three versions over the years but the first one is best and I don't think that one's available anymore.

Jim Butcher has this weird-ass series with airships and castles and talking cats'n'shit. There's two books in it. I have now read both. The first one was weird and okay. The second one was weird and okay.

There's also this weird-ass book about castles and airships(?!) where everyone is an elf or a goblin for some reason. The first one is weird and okay. The second one is weird and okay. the first one was basically "King Ralph, if everyone was a goblin or an elf" and the second one is basically "Sherlock Holmes, if everyone was a goblin or an elf." There's no reason for them to be goblins or elves, they just are.

There's this other weird-ass book that's basically "Sherlock Holmes, if all technology was replaced by magic, except that magic was genetic engineering, and autism was a superpower, and everyone is gay." It is better than the other weird-ass books mentioned here. I will also mention that going from that milieu to "Starship Troopers" is some whiplash.

I tried SPQR. It's fucking dogshit. There's this assumption among western historians that you must learn the Romans because they're the Romans and why wouldn't you learn the Romans and Fuck The Romans. If you can't tell me why I should give a shit, I won't. The nice thing about the Durants is they were objective about the Romans. Fuckin' nobody else is. Fuck the Romans.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is rough. The Origins of Totalitarianism is rougher.

Battle Cry Freedom is also shit. See: SPQR except for the American Civil War.

Gary Stevenson's "The Trading Game" is fucking spectacular. It's all about inequality. It's all about dragging rich people for being rich. It's all about the hollow pursuit of wealth as a hollow pursuit. And it really fucked me up that I made more money in less time than he did just buying and holding. Crypto is like a Game Genie for finance.

Johnathan Haidt's "The Anxious Generation" is shit. I think Haidt is a one-trick pony and he's started fluffing the conservatives.

A Memory Called Empire and a Desolation Called Peace are great fuckin' books. I like my space operas written by lesbians. They have so much more color. Also, let me just say that this new flavor of sci fi and fantasy where they aren't written by privileged white men? Fuckin' rules.

I read The Communist Manifesto. It takes no time at all, also jesus christ who worships this shit

The two that broke me were Red Plenty and Secondhand Time. Red Plenty sets you up for the bleakness, Secondhand Time rubs your fucking nose in it until it's ground down to the bone. Secondhand Time followed by the Biden debate followed by the Trump assassination attempt was just too goddamn much. It's one thing to watch stupid fucking Republicans cheering for totalitarianism and stupid fucking Independents willing to throw away the future on principle, it's another thing doing it while reading an oral history of people longing for Stalin while also describing all of their relatives murdered by Stalin.

I'm about halfway through The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Have read the Dhammapadana.

Yesterday I started reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway after enjoying Titanium Noir a while ago. So far I like the latter more than the former, but it's a slow burn supposedly.

Been reading a bit more lately.

- Started The Poppy War Trilogy, by R.F Kuang, but stopped after finishing the second book, didn't feel compelled to read further.

- Finished This is how you lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladston. Had a good time with that. Very short.

- Finished Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Had a blast with that.

- Finished The Will of the Many by James Islington. Had my gripes all throughout, but the end did leave me wanting to know more. So I'll get the sequel when it emerges.

- Finished The Book that Wouldn't Burn and The Book that Broke the World both by Mark Lawrence. I had initially sworn off Mark Lawrence's stuff after struggling through one of his early, edgy books. But these were fun. They didn't go in the direction I was expecting, at points, but good fun. Will be keen to read the final one when it's ready.

- Finished The Fisherman by John Langan. Was in need of a horror, and I think that fit the bill.

- Finished The Three Body Problem but haven't gotten to the rest of the series.

- Finished The Faithful and the Fallen series by John Gwynne. It was cool, I can get invested pretty easily into things but it definitely had some issues. I think it was clear that was his debut series, he's gotten noticeably tighter with his stories since.

- Finished The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, as a part of the book club I'm in. Was cool. Historical Fiction isn't usually my jam but that's the joy of the book club! Throwing stuff my way I'd not normally delve into.

- Re-read Downunder by Bill Bryson. It's just really funny and entertaining, felt like dipping back into it.

Currently reading The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm 80 pages in and I've laughed out loud, but also felt compelled to skip entire sections because they're just aggressive lore-dumps, jammed into an already set scene. I'll see if this continues, if it does, I might stop while I'm ahead.

My friend got me onto the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, so might give those a hoon at some point.

I'm reading both Boethian Number Theory (De Institutione Arithmetica) and Fundamentals of Music (De Institutione Musica), and it's a good insight into how people conceptualized numbers and their relations/representations. It has a lot of that "continuous function is the one I can draw without lifting the pen off the paper" meets Feynman's lectures flair to it, describing in word or simple drawing what today would have been a formula/proof. They're even less rigorous than expected, but (often enough) very intuitive and demonstrative at the same time. Not always, heaven forbid; when it's muddled, I can spend more time working through a paragraph than an entire pulp novel, but it's easy to see why they were amongst the primary textbooks pretty much until the early modern period. They also tangetially inspired me to read some of the 'lesser' works by Aristotle in the near future, like On Generation and Creation or Meteorologica.

Combined with my earlier readings of Ptolemy's Almagest and Euclid's Elements, I guess I'm about to finally graduate the Quadrivium ;).

Oh, and yesterday I finished The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion by Daniel McCoy. Good read, covers the basics and goes the extra mile to point out the differences between what we know, what we can't know, and what is just romanticized later/modern vision of vikings and their mythology. The translations/retellings in the second part of the book are a bit too stilted, and it honestly wouldn't take that much effort to improve them, but they certainly aren't bad either.

thanks for the rec. I have a short trip coming up in the fall and that sounds like just the right thing.