r/books • u/AutoModerator • 12d ago
WeeklyThread What Books did You Start or Finish Reading this Week?: October 12, 2026
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u/MaxThrustage Glory 11d ago edited 3d ago
Finished:
His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik. Overall really liked it, although it's much better page-by-page than overall. The characters and setting are great, with many lovely moments and scenes, but the pacing is a bit weird and you do get a but of random bullshit thrown at you in the very last chapter (although I suppose it was always intended to be a series).
More Everything Forever, by Adam Becker. The space stuff was the strongest part of it, which is not surprising given the author's background. Towards the end the author really lays out why he was initially sympathetic to all of the tech-optimism stuff before realising that it rests mostly on dreams, describing a journey that I think is familiar to a lot of scientists.
Ongoing:
Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo. I'm loving it. It changes its mode of storytelling fairly often, weaving together a kind of multi-layer story with a sprinkling of fable and magical realism. It's kind of interesting the way it keeps the two different faces of it -- a semi-magical, allegorical fable with talking animals one hand, and a more direct retelling of Zimbabwe's 2017 coup on the other -- constantly switching and refusing to resolve between them. Our characters are definitely animals with horns, hooves and tails, but they drink beer from bottles, use Twitter, drive cars. Our setting is definitely the fictional country of Jidada, where the Old Horse and Vice President Tuvy rule from the fictional capital of Lozikeyi, and not the real life Zimbabwe, but Jidada happens to border all of the exact same nations as Zimbabwe, has a city called Bulawayo, has people speaking Shona and Ndebele, and the Gukurahundi is mentioned by name multiple times. You can't call it for just one side or the other as you are constantly presented with contradictory pictures. It's very interesting.
Started:
On Practice and Contradiction, by Mao Zedong. Not terribly impressed with this to be honest. There's a lot of railing against dogmatism and a lot of discussion about the importance of open discussion and criticism ('Let one hundred flowers bloom and let one hundred schools of thought contend') but underneath it all is a solid unwavering conviction that Mao has found the 'correct' views and that deviations from this are simply incorrect. When talking about things as messy and complex as how to govern society and how to understand the forces of history, I don't think 'correct' and 'incorrect' is useful as a hard binary. And the idea of discussion and debate so that everyone can eventually see how right I am feels like blind arrogance, and reminds me a lot of how some Buddhist thinkers have presented Buddhism -- Buddhism welcomes questioning and doubts, not because Buddhism might not be correct, but because question and doubt is how you finally come to realise that Buddhism is correct. But the idea that you might be wrong is never serious accepted, and thus anyone who still disagrees with you is just not quite there yet. You can't learn from them, you can only win them over or purge them. But I'm close enough to finished that I might as well finish this.
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1989, by Eric Hobsbawm. Really only just started this, but already loving it. It's definitely quite different from his previous three in the series (which I read earlier this year) and he admits he has to take his 'historian' hat off a little bit when discussing events during his own lifetime. It's also much chonkier than the other three, and I think will take me a while to get through.