Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, August 2024

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on world history. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, volume 2 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th--18th Century

On re-reading, I am much more struck by Braudel's constant, but un-supported, assertions about who controlled various trades. "Power" and "control" are unavoidably causal notions, which means that at the very least they involve counterfactuals, the sort of thing B. would normally say he avoids. A bit more concretely: say Braudel is right that in the late 1500s and earlier 1600s, the European international currency market was funneled through a small number of mostly Genovese merchants/bankers operating at periodic fairs. (Subsequent scholarship seems to agree.) I'm sure those traders made money. In fact, I'm sure that they exploited network externalities to make supra-normal profits. But asserting that they controlled those currency markets implies that they could have imposed different outcomes --- on exchange rates? on discount rates? Braudel never bothers to say --- if they had wanted to, as opposed to having their actions more or less dictated by the real economic activity which generated bills of exchange, demand for currency exchange, etc. Braudel does not provide evidence for control, and it doesn't even arise as a problem within his horizon.

Wishing Braudel had collaborated with someone like (impossibly) Paul Krugman, or (more plausibly, but still impossibly) Charles Kindleberger, is both idle and impertinent, even philistine, but I can't help it.

Sequel.

Glen Cook, The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The White Rose (also an omnibus, Chronicles of the Black Company, not seen by me)

Mind candy military fantasy, in which Our Protagonists find themselves working as mercenaries for the Dark Lord's only-barely-less-evil ex-wife, on whom the narrator develops an unhealthy crush. (These are not spoilers.) There are a lot of these, and I might pick up more later, but this first trilogy comes to a satisfying ending point.

(I'd be very surprised if these weren't an influence on Graydon Saunders, though the prose style is rather different.)

Megan E. O'Keefe, The Blighted Stars

Mind candy: a very angsty romance wrapped in a shell of space opera. Both aspects of the story are left in media res, and I look forward to reading the sequels.

Phillip Kennedy Johnson et al., The Last God

Mind candy, comic book fantasy heavily influenced by D & D.

Wen Spencer, Tinker

Mind candy fantasy, in which Pittsburgh is transported to Elfland for most of each month. I read it for the local interest (admission to CMU plays a small part of the plot, and bad things happen in Turtle Creek [which I can only too easily believe]), and it was OK, but not good enough to make me pick up any of the many sequels.

Lilith Saintcrow, Moon's Knight

Mind candy portal fantasy, in which Our Protagonist's struggles to escape back to Mundania are rather complicated by her growing recognition that her life there sucked, actually, and maybe fighting strange beasts and stranger people isn't so bad in comparison...

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity; The Dismal Science; Heard About Pittsburgh PA