A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett

 

A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett is the next book in the Shadow of the Leviathan series.

Started: June 24, 2025
Completed: June 28, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

I truly enjoy reading what I have read by Robert Jackson Bennett.  This series is truly rich and, somehow, Bennett manages to continue world building with strong character development and simply excellent turns of phrase.  I do not generally enjoy mysteries, so I think it is likely that I am not a good person to recommend them.  I enjoyed this mystery.  I particularly enjoyed the lack of a "secret clue" and I also fully accepted that Ana could connect things that I could not.  A fun, adventurous mystery with enough fantasy to make the world richly different.  The author's note at the end was particularly fantastic.

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, H.G. Parry

 

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry

Started: June 17, 2025
Completed: June 24, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: I think that this was recommended by Kobo.

Words for which I sought help:

prat -- a fool

Review:

I enjoyed this book.  The characters were rather flat, but the plot was nicely elaborate.  Parry's foreshadowing was blunt, so it was easy to see where the story was going, but it was a sufficiently elaborate plot with enough interwoven pieces to keep my interest despite being a bit transparent.  It was a fun read.

The Philosophy of Epictetus, Scaltsas and Mason

 

The Philosophy of Epictetus Edited by Theodore Scaltsas and Andrew S. Mason.  I picked this book up as a result of cascading endnotes/footnotes.  While reading and marking Open Socrates (I first listened to this book from the library, then bought a copy so that I could take notes), I found that there were several references to Epictetus (mostly from Robin Hard's translation: Epictetus Discourses, Fragments, Handbook), so I picked up Robin Hard's translation.  In the introduction to that work, there were several references to this book, so I got a copy of it.  I have been only obliquely aware of Epictetus (I thought he was a "founding father" of the Stoics, which isn't really true, more a professor of the Stoics, whereas Zeno is actually a founding father).  I found the references intriguing and suddenly was reading another book.  This is a collection of essays about Epictetus' philosophy which came about as a result of a conference.  I plan to attend a workshop on Morality at the University of Maryland (Moral Metaphysics at Maryland Workshop) at the end of the month, so I thought that understanding Epictetus' take on morality would be useful.  I have been reading a bit each morning and taking notes as well as referencing Hard's translation of Epictetus' known work.  Anil Seth keeps getting shuffled back and now Agnes Callard is taking a back seat.

Started: May 1, 2025?
Completed: June 18, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Christopher Gill (in the introduction to Hard's translation of Epictetus)

Words for which I sought help (English only, lots of Latin, Greek, French, and German):

conduce -- help to bring about

eudaimonist -- a proponent of eudaimonism, an ethical theory that emphasizes the pursuit of happiness and flourishing as the ultimate goal in life

hendiadys -- the expression of a single idea by two words connected with "and" e.g. nice and warm

protreptic -- a speech designed to instruct and persuade

Review:

I truly had not intention of studying Epictetus.  Stoicism, to me, has always felt like either a cold way to live or remarkably self indulgent (rarely both simultaneously).  As a result, the works of the Stoics have had little interest to me and, frankly, seemed to be misplaced.  I read some of the references in Callard but it was the morality workshop that encouraged me to read this book--though, as it turned out, that workshop was at a completely different level than the practical morality of Epictetus.

There is a vast difference between reading an Ancient Greek writer and studying an Ancient Greek writer.  The words are not necessarily meaningful in today's context (even with a good translation).  This book facilitates study.  Even while the study is rather isolated to specific areas of Epictetus, the reams of references in the back of this book could easily lead to another 5 years of reading and studying.

Credit needs to be given to Oxford University Press who published this book and must have realized that the market would be remarkably small.

The Ideological Brain, Leor Zmigrod

 

The Ideological Brain:  The radical science of flexible thinking by Leor Zmigrod

Started: June 11, 2025
Completed: June 17, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Review:

What if you had an answer for every situation?  Wouldn't that make action easier?  There would be no need to think in any given situation, simply to take action based upon your prior understanding of what should be done.  What would that do to your brain?

A dogmatic thinker (in the extreme) ceases to interact with the real world to foster understanding, rather assets his/her dogmatic understanding as a way to frame the real world and pigeon-hole decision making.  Once one accepts a particular ideology, everything can be framed in terms of that ideology and the reason for action becomes clear based on the tenets of the dogma.

Zmigrod identifies ideologs by asking basic questions, performing simple tasks, and monitoring for specific brain activity.  Having identified a person with dogmatic thinking, Zmigrod starts to examine his/her perspective on the world and finds that dogmatic thinking shades into many areas, not simply the political.  Identifying that dogmatic thinking is a pervasive effect, Zmigrod attempts to understand dogmatic thinking in terms of genetics, physical structure, and culture.

Dogmatic thinkers are not predestined to think they way that they do from something physical (though there may be a disposition).  Dogmatic thinking is fostered through ritual and repetition.  Sometimes it is inculcated through mentally and physically painful initiations (although, Zmigrod makes the argument that the brain structure may allow the initiations to be passed rather than creating the thought pattern itself).  Culture can foster an environment which facilitates dogmatic thinking.

Zmigrod leaves open the possibility that ideologs can be reached and their thinking made more flexible, but she argues that the path an ideolog must follow to overcome this thinking is non-linear (she suggests a spiral of thought) and there are many ways that the ideolog can easily turn into dogmatic thinking on the way out (albeit perhaps via a different dogma).

A Friend of the Earth, T.C. Boyle

 

d

A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle

Started: August 17, 2024
Completed: June 14, 2025
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By: Nobody

Words for which I sought help:

exophthalmic -- having or characterized by protruding eyes

mendacity -- untruthfulness, lying

scrim -- something that conceals or obscures something else

timbales -- shallow single-headed drums with metal casing

Review:

I think that I just don't like Boyle's writing style.  This book is OK, the characters are a bit flat and the plot is pretty thin.  Boyle does a good job of painting a picture of a world that has been crushed by climate change and the weird ways that people adjust to living in the new normal.  The foreshadowing is clunky and the way the story is put together just rubs me the wrong way.  It is an OK story, but when I compare it to something like The Overstory (which is a very similar tale) all the holes in this telling become readily apparent.

1177 B.C., Eric H. Cline

 

1177 B.C.:  The year civilization collapsed by Eric H. Cline Personally, I have thought that it is unlikely The Sea Peoples are the cause of so much trouble in the Mediterranean.  My thought has been that they are problem a symptom of another problem and served more as a domino than cause.  The descriptions I heard sounded like they were more refugees rather than marauders.

Started: June 7, 2025
Completed: June 11, 2025
Recommendation: Highly Recommended
Recommended By: I saw this on the bookshelves behind Marc Elias during a Democracy Docket Youtube

Review:

It is important that you be interested in what happened at the end of the Bronze Age.  This is not a narrative that is going to easily carry you, so if you don't have an interest, it is probably not for you.  The breadth of the research that Cline covers is pretty good, though the depth is not great for scholars.  There is enough narrative, however, to make it interesting.  Foreshadowing does not really exist (Cline just refers you to later chapters) so, again, this book does not carry you.  It is an interesting read and Cline draws from multiple disciplines in order to try to make sense of the end of the Bronze Age (1177 is not so terribly important, I think that the actual tipping date tends to move +/- 100 years--I seem to remember an interview with the author where he decided on the title, then had to change it, then it flipped back right before the book went to press).  That is both a cool and weird thing about archaeology, it is an on-going study and at any minute some artifact may come out and change everything.

Polostan, Neal Stephenson

 

Polostan by Neal Stephenson is the first book in the Bomb Light series

Started: June 3, 2025
Completed: June 7, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By:  Nobody, I just pretty much read what Stephenson writes.  It isn't all perfect, but it is always interesting

Review:

This feels like a Forest Gump sort of walk through the history of the atomic bomb.  The protagonist here is wicked smart and female.  I enjoyed the start, but find it hard to highly recommend this book as it feels so very incomplete.  I also did not like the torture scene.  Maybe there is a really good reason for that beyond the scope of this book, but if it is just the scope of this book, then I feel it was more than was needed to make the point.

All Fours, Miranda July

 

All Fours by Miranda July

Started: June 2, 2025
Completed: June 3, 2025
Recommendation: Not Recommended
Recommended By:  A friend on good reads

Review:

To some people, I'm sure, this book is a revelation and a triumph.  To me, it is mostly raunchy.  Far too much of this book is spent masturbating for me.  I just did not enjoy it.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson

 

The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Started: May 27, 2025
Completed: June 2, 2025
Recommendation: Recommended
Recommended By: I cannot remember how I came across this book

Review:

What is the right thing to think?  I am horrified by the main character.  The main plot line is horribly confused.  There is a second book (maybe a third).  So, I don't want to give anything away because this book is best read without any idea of what is coming next.  It isn't that there is a particular thrill to be had around every corner but that things are very fluid.  I'm just not sure what to think.  The characters are broadly hideously complex.  The level of calculation in every move is astounding.  I cannot say that I walked away from this book happy, but there is a low level yearning to find out what happens next or, perhaps more importantly, to better understand what already did happen.