Three-Toed Sloth

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

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the history of magic in Renaissance Europe, or even on US politics. 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.

J. Clayton Rogers, At the Midway [e-book only, all the usual places]

Mind candy, historical creature-feature thriller: in which the US military, in the form of the very worst ship in Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet, comes up against beasts which are not oversized plesiosaurs. (Exactly what they are instead would be a minor spoiler.) I have no idea how I found this online, but it's perfectly enjoyable as a specimen of the genre. §

Sanford C. Gordon and Jamila Ruddock, What Your Professor Thinks You Already Know About US Politics [not in print, or at all digital bookstores, but: Kindle, Apple Books]

A brisk, no-nonsense little book of about 100 pages which does exactly what its title promises. I forget (again!) how I chanced across it, but it fills a very real need for a lot of the students in my inequality class, and I intend to make it recommended/optional reading in the future. (I'll have to see if the library can buy a digital copy.) §

Anthony Grafton, Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa [doi:10.4159/9780674295124]

An elegantly-written history of the traditions of learned and natural magic in the Renaissance: what the practitioners thought they were doing, what (so far as we can reconstruct) they were actually doing, and what their contemporaries thought of them. One might take this as a learned prose gloss on one of Nietzsche's aphorisms:

Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realm of knowledge. (The Gay Science § 300, tr. Kaufmann)

Further commentary, and application to current events, is outsourced to Henry Farrell. §

Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark, In the Blood, Paint It Black, and A Dozen Black Roses

Mind candy, horror/contemporary fantasy: the first four "Sonja Blue" novels. (I'm not sure if there were any more.) The first three are a fairly tightly-connected series about the adventures of Blue, a highly-traumatized (mostly) vampire who is (therefore) an enthusiastic vampire slayer. The fourth is a retelling of Yojimbo in a Baltimore an American city that shall remain nameless, with Blue in the lead role. This is a bit of a switch, since the escalating action of the first three books is building up to a freely-telegraphed apocalypse plot, and then the fourth drops back into something much smaller scale. I'd previously read some ok-but-not-very-memorable comic books by Collins; these are considerably better. I've provided links to print versions, but I read a digital omnibus edition which on the one hand has revisions by Collins (apparently quite extensive), but also a lot of OCR errors. §

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Writing for Antiquity; Psychoceramica; The Beloved Republic; Commit a Social Science; Teaching: Statistics of Inequality and Discrimination