On the fiction side, I'm between books: I finished The First Circle a couple of days ago, and I'm letting it sit for a bit before I start anything else. I recommend it, if you have any tolerance for chunky Russian novels with cast lists three pages long. (For what it's worth, I got through it in less than a twentieth of the time it took me to slog through War and Peace.) A lot of it's quite grim, but part of what it's about is the value of human connections and unexpected kindnesses in dark times. It's the kind of book where the resolution to one character's arc is "None of my problems have actually gone away, and I still have an impossible choice to make tomorrow, but today I've made a friend I can talk it over with, and that's a lot more than I had yesterday."
On the non-fiction side, I'm still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. I'm up to the section on ecological calamities now, and the latest reminder of the book's age is how positively it talks about DDT.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2025-06-12 01:42 am (UTC)On the non-fiction side, I'm still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. I'm up to the section on ecological calamities now, and the latest reminder of the book's age is how positively it talks about DDT.