What I've Been Reading
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
I read All the Pretty Horses for the first time when I was a 24-year-old naval officer on my first trip around the world on a ship. I didn’t know then how much McCarthy I would read over the years. Nor did I attempt to finish the trilogy until this year. When I read the first book, I romanticized that I had a bit of John Grady Cole in me. And when I read its conclusion 25 years later, all I could see was my youngest son. Something in me can’t completely disengage from McCarthy’s brutal determinism. When one stays too long with the old ways, one pays the price. And to believe that life should be something more than just normal is a fatal flaw. There’s no escaping the unromantic reality that it all just ends. Try as we might.
The Vietnam War: A Military History by Geoffrey Wawro
If you would like to feel good about the military and government leadership of America in the 1960s, don’t ever read this book. And frankly, don’t ever read anything truthful about the Vietnam War. Wawro wrote a fantastic and painful account of it. As a veteran of marginally more successful counter-insurgency operations, it’s hard for me to look objectively at how irresponsible, dishonest, and misguided Westmoreland and McNamara were. Maybe it’s better for me to just believe that my generation of warfighters might have been just as stupid and dishonest if they hadn’t been so stupid and dishonest before us. I don’t have any other words that fit. I’d be kinder if there also wasn’t so much disregard for human life. One way to feel better about being bad at military strategy is to feel better about the deaths you caused for no reason. The book is wave after wave of bad strategy, brutal execution, and dishonest assessments of the reality of the war.
A Fire Upon the Deep: Vernor Vinge
For me, the bigger and more fantastical the sprawl of a sci-fi book, the better. Vernor Vinge wrote a very big, very sprawling, very weird, and fantastical book. I loved it. It’s got a little bit of everything, and though it was published at the very beginning of the internet era (1992), it has more than a few Stephenson-like predictive bits.
American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850–1873 by Alan Taylor
While all the bluster and saber-rattling of the current Trump administration toward Canada and Mexico may seem like new and dangerous territory, it’s at least not new. That the French invaded Mexico and Canada began its severance from Great Britain at the same time the South seceded from the Union is mostly lost to the modern narrative of the 19th century. At the time, though, it was clear that the outcomes of all three were related. Or at least the fear of what might happen to Mexico or Canada if the Union or the Confederacy were to win drove Canadian leaders to act as they did, and absolutely bound Juarez in Mexico to the more liberal Union cause. For more than a century, borders and relations in North America have been stable. But for at least that long before, they weren’t. Maybe a return to the old equilibrium is here? Taylor, as usual is great.
In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work by Kyla Scanlon
There are immensely smart, generative people who radiate good ideas into our world. Kyla Scanlon is one of them, and her book is great. Put it on you shelf and reference it to sound smart…
The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
I’m well on my way to reading everything Asimov wrote, which is a bit like listening to early ’60s rock and roll. It feels derivative because nearly everything in the genre came out of those base styles and themes. It’s a primary source of genius, though. The Foundation series grapples with the very modern idea that if you have enough data and can use it earnestly, with a long enough horizon, you can predict everything—mostly because so much of the future is trapped in a deterministic loop. The black swan events don’t matter… because there are always black swans… and so, therefore, there are no black swans…
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
There are some anthropological theories suggesting that the high mortality rate of children prior to modern medical practice led to a somewhat limited emotional attachment to them. The idea is that child mortality was so common prior to the 19th century that it was hardly viewed as tragic. It’s hard to think that we’ve grown our attachment to children only in the last 150 years, so I’ve always been somewhat dubious of that claim. Maggie O’Farrell’s book about Shakespeare’s wife Agnes (not Anne Hathaway?) and the death of her son Hamnet suggests I’m right. While the topic and period alone are interesting, O’Farrell’s writing is quite good. It’s a crisp, rolling style of physical and emotional detail. A film based on the book is set for release in 2025.
Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa
Have kids. When they get older, they buy you books. My oldest son is a manga and anime fan, and he’s turned me on to them. I’m on book 17 (of 18) of the Fullmetal Alchemist series and it’s great—partly because of how good it is and partly because it has opened up the entire weird and interesting world of manga and anime for me. While not a new genre, the shrinking of the world for kids today allows them to be both completely assimilated into base cultures (every kid at my youngest kid’s high school has the same haircut—every… single… one) and introduced to more eclectic genres of art and entertainment. Manga and anime were around when I was a kid, but there was no way to ever see them. And that’s different—and better—for kids today. The fun part is that I have a lot to catch up on…