Most recent book was dipping back into Neal Stephenson’s earlier work with Diamond Age. A moderately near future examination of ubiquitous nanotechnology. The economic upheaval that results from the irrelevancy of traditional manufacturing basically ends nation states as we know it, but thanks to intellectual property laws, poverty and class division are as prevalent as ever.

Neal Stephenson has a distinctive style to his writing. He gleefully pelts you with a stream of two-dollar words (some of them invented) in a cadence that might encourage you to read him out loud on open mic night at the coffee shop. While Diamond Age is no exception, his vision of a neo-Victorian culture seems to have inspired him to find his inner Jane Austen in some passages, while other sections of the book tell a parallel story in classic fairy tale form.

On the nonfiction side, the most recent book was Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Dr. Peter Attia. Being a book on aging and longevity, I went into it with some degree of skepticism. However, instead of getting oversold, under-researched pet theories or This One Trick(tm) oversimplification, I was impressed at the degree to which the book focused on a pragmatic application of recent science, and emphasized things everybody can do without being wealthy enough to do the not-covered-by-insurance things that Dr. Attia’s patients encounter his his private practice.

If there is one major shortcoming in the book, it is that Dr. Attia makes clear (with an unfortunate display of the obliviousness of the wealthy) that he and his patients live in that world of people who can afford doing all sorts of things insurance is unwilling to cover. His goal is to stimulate a conversation about access to more forward-thinking healthcare, but sometimes it just comes across as flexing.

“How Propaganda Works” by Jason Stanley. Political philosopher Stanley, whose parents survived the Holocaust, is a Yale compatriot of historian Tim Snyder and Snyder’s wife Marci Shore.

Your series peaked my interest in Tomasello’s Evolution of Agency, so I recently finished that. Currently working my way through Sharlet’s The Undertow, seeing how his takeaways on the cultural underpinnings of MAGA align with my own experiences of the nascent form of it growing up. For work related background I’ve been reading Griffiths and Stotz “Genetics and Philosophy” which has to do with the extent to which we can understand how biological order is determined by genetic information. It is sort of technical but very readable and, to my surprise, really engaging which is why I’m mentioning it. so it goes from the abstract view of the gene as an hypothetical agent of heritability ala Mendel to discovery of its material properties and then abstracting it once again into information networks to try and understand how genes operate collectively. and then whether the anti-reductionist methods of systems biology will be able to yield meaningful insights into how such networks specify order.

This week I read my last 3 unread Andrew Vachss novels, *Signwave*, *Shockwave*, and *Aftershock*, and re-read James Lee Burke’s *Another Kind of Eden*. I hadda commute to the Loop twice, so that’s about 5 hours of reading time right there.

Currently reading Ken Bruen’s *Callous*.

Recent reads: The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Armor of Light by Ken Follett.

Currently reading: 1932 by Scott Martelle, The Theory of Everything Else by Dan Schreiber

Just finished “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” by Cormac McCarthy, his final two, then turned right around and read them both again. What a mind. Both more accessible than I expected, with little physical violence, and near-perfect dialogue (Stella Maris is entirely dialogue).

I am halfway through “What do we Need Men For? A Modest Proposal” by E. Jean Carroll. She is a very funny writer. I’m so glad she won all that money!

Eve by Cat Bohonnan sounds like it might be Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s “The Woman who Never Evolved” for a new generation of readers, covering a new generation of evolutionary ecology & mating systems. Hrdy’s dissertation was on infanticide by dominant male Lemurs, where the naïve thought was it happened in times of resource shortages. Hrdy’s fieldwork showed it was nothing of the sort: rather, dominant males only lasted in power a couple of years, and lactating females might not come back into estrous before the male was deposed. Infanticide gave the dominant male more chances to successfully leave his own offspring. [Infanticide by males in pride or harem mating systems has been found in other primates.] She went one step further and hypothesized that females evolved their own strategies to minimize infanticide, very much against the dominant assumptions in evolutionary ecology of mating systems. She showed that natural selection acts on female mating and reproductive strategies every bit as much as it does on males, in primates, mammals, and birds.

I’m currently reading two books, one of which parallels Eve and The Woman who Never Evolved: “We are the Land” by Damon Akins & William Bauer. In most histories of California, the indigenous peoples are either ignored or at best treated as passive, helpless victims. But the indigenous people were not passive: they strategized and explored and learned, attempting to leverage the different waves of European invaders in interactions with their neighbors, to trade for goods, and to mitigate or reduce the devastation happening to them. [The recent historic understanding of the conquest of Mexico has a similar emphasis on the agency of the locals, not the blind self-reported awesomeness of Cortez.] The cool part is that each chapter is followed by a section on “native spaces”: how a particular set of peoples lived in a part of California.

The other is a modern statistics book I need to re-read: Stroup’s Generalized Linear Mixed Models. Fortunately, as a reviewer in a statistics journal noted, this book is both extremely well-written and dryly humorous, things no one expects in a hard core statistics book.

Yesterday I finished 𝑀𝑟. 𝐺𝑎𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔’𝑠 𝑇𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑣𝑒𝑙, Julia Keller’s biography of the man who invented that enduring killing machine. He invented several other contraptions besides, most of them pertaining to agriculture, though in so far as he is remembered at all, it is in the name of his machine gun. He was once as famous as Edison, and grew wealthy from his combination of mechanical ingenuity and business sense, though he is largely forgotten now. Keller’s book is a well-sourced look at the man and his times (19th-century United States).

On the side burner, I continue with my long-delayed read of the US Army “Green Book” history of the Second World War. This is a reading project I put off for a while — there is so much else to read — but I thought I’d better get started on it. I’m to volume IV of the 80 or so volumes. The early volumes are all about planning and logistics. The one I’m on is 𝑆𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑐 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝐶𝑜𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑊𝑎𝑟𝑓𝑎𝑟𝑒: 1943-1944. It’s not as dry as it may sound, though it is fairly dry. A taste for such books is an acquired taste, I guess, and I’ve been a history buff my whole life. I hadn’t realized before reading this series just how hobbled the American and British options were by difficulties with shipping. There were just never enough cargo ships and troop ships and landing craft.

History is not the only I subject I read. Next up on my short stack is 𝑛𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑑 by David Sedaris. He’s the guy who first rose to fame through his public radio piece about working as a Christmas elf at Macy’s. I heard him read in a bookstore before he reached the concert hall level of fame, and he was remarkably funny. That was when he was touring to promote his book 𝑀𝑒 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑘 𝑃𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑦 𝑂𝑛𝑒 𝐷𝑎𝑦 (a copy of which I bought and he cleverly autographed). 𝑛𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑑 came out even before that, and it seems it will prove amusing. A nice distraction from our current dire days, calling to me from a time not so long ago yet seeming to be on the other side of an almost unbridgeable rupture.

I have a long standing habit of buying thrift store books. It’s how I have stumbled into many very good writers. It works because most of the shelves are filled with pulp romance, crime, and beach novels, so anything that does not fall into those areas sticks out. The Master and Margarita is one that I found there. Another was Greenlanders, by Jane Smiley. It’s been some years, but I recall the language being almost Biblical. It was also unsettling. From what I can tell she adheres pretty closely to the late years of Icelandic settlement in Greenland. I was very much taken aback at the very beginning, when a settler carries his cows from the byre where they have wintered out to pasture, reflecting on tales of a time when winters did not last so long cattle’s legs were too weak from disuse to walk by spring. I had to go to the internet where I learned how much smaller medieval cattle were). The climate change in Greenlanders is from cold to warm, but climate change nonetheless. Isolation was due to multiple causes–climate change making the passages more dangerous, development of market for elephant tusks replacing narwhale horns as a source of ivory, plagues in Europe. As the cold and isolation increase, cultural and religious traditions fray, replaced by fringe superstitions. Written in 1988, it feels prophetic now.

I started using Kindle during the pandemic and with too many books in the house using it again. It’s annoying what Libby counts as literature though when I check out books using it.