{"id":19999,"date":"2010-07-27T14:08:08","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T22:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=5161"},"modified":"2010-07-27T14:08:08","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T22:08:08","slug":"summer-books-what%e2%80%99s-readable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2010\/07\/27\/summer-books-what%e2%80%99s-readable\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer books, what\u2019s readable?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Danny reminded me that I still hadn’t read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World<\/a>. Since I know him a bit (at least internet “know”) I’ve decided I can’t put it off any longer, and I’ll tackle it soon. I just finished two books, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939<\/a> and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire<\/a>. I can recommend the first, but not the second. Since I will (or plan to) review Replenishing the Earth<\/a>, I won’t say more about it here. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens<\/a> was written by the author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World<\/a>. The author is a bit on the pro-Mongol side (he always ends up making Genghis Khan a benevolent warlord!), and his writing style doesn’t have the density which I prefer in these sorts of works, but Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World<\/a> was a serviceable book. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens<\/a> on the other hand is too sensational, and it seems rather obvious that the source material was much thinner than for Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World<\/a> (he admits as much repeatedly), so he had to include a lot of apocryphal material, with caveats, to fill it out. I much preferred The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age<\/a>, which I read earlier this summer. A naturally more turgid work without a central narrative (each chapter was written by a different academic), but lots of dense data.<\/p>\n

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\nSo what are you reading? What would you recommend? Over the years I’ve noticed I don’t read much science in book form; I much prefer papers. But since I don’t read physics or chemistry papers that means I haven’t recharged my familiarity, at least on a superficial level, with these fields in years. So I plan to a hit a few popular physics books at some point summer. And I’m always up for economics, world history, international affairs, cognitive psychology, etc.* I suspect I’ll avoid fiction until George R. R. Martin gets his next book out<\/a>, but that might mean I’ll avoid fiction for a long<\/i> time.<\/p>\n

* In my short-term stack The Sea Kingdoms: The Story of Celtic Britain and Ireland<\/a>, Lives of Confucius: Civilization’s Greatest Sage Through the Ages<\/a>, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends on It<\/a> and The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us<\/a>. In my medium-term “must-read” queue, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like<\/a> and Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Danny reminded me that I still hadn’t read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Since I know him a bit (at least internet “know”) I’ve decided I can’t put it off any longer, and I’ll tackle it soon. I just finished two books, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19999"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20355,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19999\/revisions\/20355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}