2023 Reading Log
in Reading
Fiction
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
The Golden Fool by Robin Hobb
Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb
Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb
Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb
Fool’s Assassin by Robin Hobb
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
REAMDE by Neal Stephenson
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
The Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance
Light Bringer by Pierce Brown
Chain of Fools by Steven Womack
The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
Nonfiction
Are We Still Rolling? by Phill Brown
Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot
The Art of Clear Thinking by Hasard Lee
Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman
Technology Strategy Patterns by Eben Hewitt
Excerpts
Seveneves
p. 238
Luisa chuckled. “I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word – politics – that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”
The Golden Fool
It was a long involved story, full of detail, and I let it stream gently past me. Fennel came to my chair, stood pu and dug his front claws into my leg, then hauled himself up into my lap. From there, he surveyed the table.
Butter for the cat.
I have no reason to be nice to you.
Yes you do. I am the cat
He was so supremely self-confident that that was enough reason for me to butter a corner of a slice of break and offer it to him.
Silence asks the questions that are too awkward to phrase. It even asks the questions one does not know to ask.
Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust.
“So stop bemoaning what a mess you’ve made, and start demanding that Hap take responsibility for himself.” She settled herself deeper into her chair. As if to herself, she added, “You’re quite enough messes of your own to clean up, without claiming responsibility for everyone else’s.”
I stared at her in amazement.
Tonight, when he comes back, I’m telling him that I’m turning him out of my house, because I don’t want trouble to come calling at my door.” She laughed aloud at the look on my face. “It’s called a consequence, Tom. Hap should feel more of them. And when he comes moaning to you, I think you should let him deal with it on his own.”
I should have known that I could never understand him as I understood other people. Explanations had seldom worked between us. Trust had.
Ony man armed with the right word may do what an army of swordsmen cannot. – Mountain Proverb
Fool’s Fate
“How do you do it?” I asked the Fool suddenly. “You shift who you are from year to year and place to place. Don’t you ever feel regret that no one truly knows you as the person you were born?” He shook his head slowly. “I am not the person I was born. Neither are you. I know no one who is. Truly, Fitz, all we ever know are facets of one another. Perhaps we feel as if we know one another well when we know several facets of that person. Father, son, brother, friend, lover, husband … a man can be all of those things, yet no one person knows him in all those roles. I watch you being Hap’s father, and yet I do not know you as I knew my father, any more than I knew my father as his brother did. So. When I show myself in a different light, I do not make a pretense. Rather I bare a different aspect to the world than they have seen before. Truly, there is a place in my heart where I am forever the Fool and your playfellow. And within me there is a genuine Lord Golden, fond of good drink and well-prepared food and elegant clothing and witty speech. And so, when I show myself as him, I am deceiving no one, but only sharing a different part of myself.”
I would not call him an educated man, yet, as he puts it, anything he has ever decided he needed to know, he’s found a way to learn.
“No. I don’t,” he admitted easily, but with growing outrage. “And neither do you. You go around making these monumental decisions about what other people should know or not know about their own lives. But you don’t really have any more idea how it will turn out than I do! You just do what you think is safest and then crawl around hoping no one will find out and blame you later if things go wrong!”
[D]iplomacy is the velvet glove that cloaks the fist of power. Persuasion, not force, works best and lasts longest.
He smiled, and reminded me that no man could make time, but only use that which he was given wisely.
