What I’ve been reading
1. Richard J. Williams, Why Cities Look the Way They Do. Mostly interesting, think of this as a humanities-laden approach to cities, but without too much mumbo-jumbo. Excerpt: “As long ago as 1968, a British art critic, Lawrence Alloway, grasped something of this. Writing about the Biennial, he argued that Venice wasn’t a city, but should be better understood as a cultural medium, like an exhibition or a newspaper, ‘compounded of famous architecture, recurrent festivals, and tourist industries’. Venice, he wrote was ‘ a communicative pattern, a geo-temporal work of art’.”
2. Evan Thompson, Why I am Not a Buddhist. For every view, there should be a book “Why I am not X.” This gets us part of the way there. That said, I have simpler reasons for not being a Buddhist, namely I do not think it is true.
3. Jonathan Eig, Ali: A Life. Definitely recommended, this is an excellent boxing book, race relations book, 1960s and 70s book, and much more.
4. Mary Robinette Kowal, The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel. Readable, with a clear and propulsive plot, but somehow it stopped being of interest to me about halfway through. It is the recent Hugo and also Nebula Award winner for best novel.
5. Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality. A very good study of the developments of early 20th century physics, the parts about Rutherford and Planck being most novel to me.
6. Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, with essays by A. Roy, Mishra, and others. You may or may not agree with the pro-Kashmiri take of this book, but some issues you learn best by reading the partisans on each side, who offer clarity if nothing else, and then drawing your own conclusions. I suspect the Kashmir crisis falls into that bucket. (Learning when to apply this trick is one good way to make your reading more productive.)
Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age 1000-1765 is a useful, non-partisan, and coherent take on exactly what the title suggests.
Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, has gotten good press on Twitter, but it reminds me of Churchill on democracy.
I started two very long novels — Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, but neither clicked with me. The former seems too simple/brutal/masculine for its 1300 pp. length, and the latter is a mix of American and obscure I don’t care about this kind of stuff. Still, I will try them each again.
The new Stripe Press book is Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto, Get Together: How to build a community with your people, a how-to guide.