Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, November 2020

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on 20th century history.

(Left almost-finished in 2020, because I got interrupted, and posted in 2026, because I wanted to procrastinate about half-a-dozen research projects.)

Nicholas Freeling, Cold Iron and The Night Lords

Mind candy mysteries, with local color for provincial France in the 1970s (when they were written). §

Allison Brennan, Silenced, Stalked, Cold Snap, Stolen, Dead Heat, Best Laid Plans, No Good Deed

Mind candy mysteries. The protagonist is a bit of a Mary Sue, and there's a fair amount of soap-opera among the ensemble cast, but they're nonetheless enjoyable. (I wouldn't have read half-a-dozen in a row otherwise, would I?) §

Sequels.

Jennifer Roberson, Sword-Dancer

Mind candy fantasy, in which our no-good-nik narrator finds himself caught up in someone else's high-minded quest for vengeance. §

Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916--1931

To brutally over-simplify, this is Tooze suggesting, in great detail, that there really was a chance that the world after the Great War could have coalesced into an international system dominated by a set of liberal democracies under American hegemony and security guarantees, i.e., roughly what happened in "the free world" after World War II. That this didn't happen is, in Tooze's account, partly down to a series of accidents*, partly down to opposition to American hegemony, and partly down to American leaders being unable, or unwilling, to rise to the occasion. (Whether this makes the post-war order more contingent (because it could have been pre-empted), or less (because something very like it could have formed decades earlier) is a nice question for the philosophers of history.) It's far, far outside my competence to evaluate whether this thesis of Tooze's is really supoportable, but it's almost beside the point. The experience of reading this is to be brought deftly along a globe-spanning web of interconnections, moving seamlessly from place to place and scale to scale. §

*: He does not, that I can recall, discuss any of the large number of accidents which could have derailed the Bolsheviks' coup in 1917. I am not sure what Tooze's grandfather would have made of the way he portrays the Russian Revolution...

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Pleasures of Detection, Portraits of Crime; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity