Book round-up: March 2020

[sixthlight]

I said in February I expected to not read very much in March, because of the new job starting. That...well, that happened, but also Everything Else Happened, you do not need me to recapitulate our current slow apocalypse. As a result, my ability to consume fiction has almost entirely vanished, which is very annoying. Hoping to get back into the swing of it over Easter.


Fiction

The Empress of Xytae (Effie Calvin)
Fourth in her loosely-connected set of fantasy f/f romances. Fine but not my favourite - the manic pixie dream girl trope is not big for me even when it's being cleverly deconstructed - but did have cameos from the leads from my favourite, and did some very interesting worldbuilding stuff. Will be keeping up with these as they come out. 

Non-fiction

The Treaty of Waitangi (Claudia Orange)
Despite being over three decades old, this is still the academic work on Te Tiriti - its origins, its signing, and its impact. And it was based on Dame Claudia's PhD thesis; throw it at anybody who tells you nobody cares what you do for your PhD research! The key lesson for me was the reinforcement of how internationally connected, thoughtful, and wary Māori iwi were at the time of British settlement...and how it didn't matter when the Empire kept moving the goalposts. A very worthy read, and I would argue essential if you are tangata tiriti. I really have to tackle Vincent O'Malley's The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa next. And if anybody has any recs for good modern histories of the post-Cook, pre-Treaty period, I'd love to hear them. 

The Curious Life Of Robert Hooke (Lisa Jardine)
Robert Hooke was one of the founding members of the Royal Society, but has never achieved the historical fame of contemporaries and rivals like Newton or Huygens. This biography is a little dry, but an interesting portrait of Commonwealth/Restoration London. There was, however, a sting in the tail - the author emphasised several times that Hooke had never married (which of course made me go 'hmm, maybe queer?'). In the second-to-last chapter, she mentions contemporary rumours he was sleeping with his orphaned teenage* niece and housekeeper. His diaries revealed...he absolutely was doing that, from when she was fifteen until she died at twenty-seven. The author treats this as morally neutral, a curious fact. I do not find it morally neutral. His contemporaries did not, either. Gross. 

*she moved in with him WHEN SHE WAS TWELVE 

Infinite Powers (Steven Strogatz)
Award-winning recent book on the history of calculus; read for book club. I quibbled somewhat with the author's thesis that calculus is uniquely important as the 'language of the universe', but for a topic which strikes fear into so many teenage hearts, this book is incredibly accessible and interesting. It gets to the heart of what calculus is useful for and how it works. As several people said during our discussion: if only we'd been given this to read when we started studying calculus at school. Highly recommended. 

Comments

[the_high_meggas]

I'm definitely adding Infinite Powers to my to read list now. I must finish a few books first though!