Read in 2021

-

Another year has left us.  While we can never return to it we can learn from it.  And one way of learning is to read books!  This was a good year for reading for me in terms of book count at least but part of that was going through many excellent Penric and Desdemona novellas which don't take as much time.  I also don't think I read as many doorstoppers as normal though there were certainly some in there.  So 70 books total compared to my baseline of 50.  I'm going to list these by category with bolded ones being particularly good.

History

  • Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation by Anton Howes
  • Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein
  • The Modern Defenses of the Coast of Maine, 1891 - 1945 by Joel W. Eastman
  • The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel
  • An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America by Nick Bunker
  • The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 by Ritchie Robertson
  • American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 by Alan Taylor
  • Venice: A New History by Thomas F. Madden
  • Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, Volume I: July 1937-May 1942 by Richard B. Frank
  • The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History by Alexander Mikaberidze
  • Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
  • The Shortest History of Germany by James Hawes
  • The Washington War: FDR's Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II by James Lacey
  • From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew,
  • 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann (Reread)
Science
  • How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
  • Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes
  • Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
  • Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier
  • Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
  • Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein
  • The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman
Space
  • Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger
  • Apollo: The Race To The Moon by Charles Murray
Covid
  • Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration's Response to the Pandemic That Changed History by Yasmeen Abutaleb, Damian Paletta
  • Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic by Scott Gotlieb
Fiction
  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir 
  • Bookburners: The Complete Season 1 by Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery 
  • Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (Reread)
  • Armor by John Steakley
  • A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine 
  • Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson
  • The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
  • Situation Normal by Leonard Richardson
  • Tales from the Folly: A Rivers of London Short Story Collection by Ben Aaronovitch
  • Milk Run by Nathan Lowell
  • Suicide Run by Nathan Lowell
  • Home Run by Nathan Lowell
  • Wicked Bronze Ambition by Glen Cook
  • The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy
  • A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
  • Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton
  • Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
  • Annie Without Crow by Michael Swanwick
  • The Black Company by Glen Cook (Reread)
  • Port of Shadows by Glen Cook
  • The Egg by Andy Weir 
  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
  • Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh
  • Regenesis by C.J. Cherryh
  • The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear 
  • Flash for Freedom by George MacDonald Fraser
  • Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonald Fraser
  • Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer (Reread)
  • Severn Surrenders by Ada Palmer (Reread)
  • The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer (Reread)
  • Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
  • The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

    Penric and Desdemona Novellas by Lois McMaster Bujold
    • Penric and the Shaman  (Reread)
    • Penric’s Mission
    • Penric's Fox
    • Mira's Last Dance
    • The Prisoner of Limnos
    • The Orphans of Raspay
    • The Physicians of Vilnoc
    • Masquerade in Lodi
    • The Assassins of Thasalon
    • Knot of Shadows
Other
  • The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef
  • China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption by Yuen Yuen Ang
  • Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier (Reread)
  • Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Various Ukraine topics

-
This is just a collection of some thoughts I've had about the recent conflict. Seeing it coming People had been worried about a Russian attack on Ukraine for a long time.  I'd worried that it was imminent a year ago with the last big massing of Russian troops on Ukraine's borders.  And with the massing this year I was more than just worried.  Going back to my predictions on  this Metaculus question  I was putting an invasion at even odds a month before the invasion but from the 13th of February until the invasion launched on the 23rd rapidly became convinced that the invasion was actually going to happen.  But while I can brag about being ahead of the curve in terms of predicting that there would be an invasion I was terribly wrong about how it would proceed and on the night of the 23rd I was afraid that the multiple axes of incursion and forward air drops would throw the defenses into confusion and rout.  Oops. Looking back at information from before the 23rd that still st
Read more

Book Review: Power, Sex, Suicide

-
Image
  Introducing the Mitochondria “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” - Variously attributed Everybody learns something about Mitochondria in grade school.  That they are an organelle inside your cells.  That they let your body break down sugar and create ATP using oxygen in a way that’s far more efficient than fermentation without oxygen.  That’s clearly an important role, when we’re drowning, say, and can’t get the oxygen needed for aerobic respiration we die.  However, they’re a lot more than that too.  Mitochondria used to have independent bacterial lives charting their own fates.  That their existence came to be so enmeshed with their hosts is arguably the most unlikely but important event in the history of life on Earth and has some implications. Pump and Dump Aerobic Respiration Essentially all life lives by extracting energy from a difference in the concentration of hydrogen across a lipid membrane.  Let’s say you’re a mitochondria or a bacteria that lives off of
Read more

Seveneves and the Roche limit

-
For an author it's important to get things that the reader might find hard to swallow out there and dealt with as soon as possible.  I didn't really enjoy Neal Stephenson's last book, REAMDE , past the halfway point because too many improbably occurrences had piled up and my suspension of disbelief didn't recover.  By contrast his newest novel, Seveneves , seems to be doing an excellent job of getting the improbable stuff dealt with quickly and I've been enjoying the book without any hangups.  I've only gotten through chapter 7, acknowledged, but I've got a feeling I'll continue to enjoy this one. But of course the second improbable of the two things gives me a chance to talk about some physics I find interesting so I'm going to dissect what I think Stephenson gets wrong.  Not because I think the author is a bad person or wrote a bad book but just because I think the physics is nifty and reading this prompted me to share it. The basic setup of th
Read more