August Book Haul!

currently stressing all my friends out with how many books I read at the same time

By Peter Coates 

“Most people”, Peter Frankopan remarks, “can name the great leaders and major battles in the past, but few can name the biggest storms, the most significant floods, the worst winters, the most severe droughts, or the ways that these influenced harvest failures, provoked political pressures or were catalysts in the spread of disease.” Environmental and climatic perspectives are not encountered nearly enough by history undergraduates – and remain absent from school curricula. “By and large”, he contends, “the weather, climate and environmental factors have rarely been seen as a backdrop to human history, let alone as an important lens through which to view the past … In the main … we ignore climate and long-run climate patterns or changes altogether when we look at history.”

Frankopan’s previous books, The Silk Roads: A new history of the world (2015) and The New Silk Roads: The present and future of the world (2018), were widely acclaimed for dazzling fresh perspectives on world history crafted in unputdownable style: big popular history at its best. In The Earth Transformed he turns to an even more epic historical saga: what we as a species have done to our home, planet earth. Starting at the dawn of time, ages before the first hominins appeared, Frankopan leaves us in the present. En route he leaps from the Iberian peninsula to the Indus Valley, from the waving wheat of the alluvial plains of ninth-century BC Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to the swaying corn of the twenty-first-century US Great Plains. A dizzying array of topics, events and themes unfold (accompanied by thirty-eight colour images, thirteen maps and seven charts). Among them are: the “Great Dying’”of marine and terrestrial biota after an extreme volcanic “episode” in present-day Siberia 252 million years ago; extinctions of megafauna such as the sabre-toothed tiger; deglaciation that submerged a third of Australia’s landmass 19,000 years ago; the Scandinavian peoples’ ninth- and tenth-century spread to Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland during the “medieval warm period” thanks to ice-free sailing, the northward migration of fish stocks and better cultivation potential (the name Greenland was not entirely down to Erik the Red’s cynical boosterism); the climate-shaped collapse of cotton prices and regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad; the horse culture of pastoralist nomadic empires in the grasslands of Kazakhstan and Mongolia; El Niño-driven patterns of alternating periods of flooding and drought in sixth-century South America; the “malaria premium” – the particular desirability as slave labour of male Africans in their early twenties from regions of the continent where resistance to malaria was highest; climate-based racial hierarchies underpinning the slave trade and plantation economy in the Americas; the dovetailing of the colonization of nature and of indigenes; and the role of thick mud in frustrating the Ottoman attempt to take Vienna in the autumn of 1529.

Frankopan also finds space for the eco-credentials, respectively, of Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism; how earthquakes and disease aggravated end-of-the-world prophecies, and the ramifications of environmental traumas for the authority of religious institutions; the killing of nearly two billion sparrows in China in 1959, a massacre that backfired spectacularly, bringing chronic food shortages (sparrows ate more insects than ears of grain); Soviet efforts under Stalin, and in China under Mao, to improve on nature’s stingy provision and reconstruct the earth in a frenzied catch-up with the capitalist West; mid-twentieth-century efforts in the US and the USSR to manipulate the weather, such as burning forests to stimulate rain, hoping that the heated air would encourage cloud formation; and horror stories about invasive non-native species such as brown tree snakes in Guam and Asian longhorn beetles in North America. There is also room for the eco-fears that haunted his boyhood: acid rain (brought to his attention on John Craven’s Newsround), the threat of nuclear winter and the shock of Chernobyl.

Occasionally it feels a bit second-hand. A quotation (1898) from the illustrious US national park advocate John Muir, for example, is sourced from a book about hiking, nudism and nature conservation in Germany. On the whole, though, The Earth Transformed is a superb synthesis of the findings of a bevy of books and bewildering number of specialist articles. The latter are drawn from archaeology, anthropology and geography as well as historical studies, but many were published in science journals, among them not just Nature and Science, but International Journal of Climatology, Journal of Spectroscopy, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, Bulletin of Vulcanology and Living Reviews in Solar Physics. The book is replete with fascinating facts and staggering statistics (in 1959, during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, “twelve times more earth was moved in a single week than during the construction of the Panama canal”). Eye-popping events, incredible inventions and a profusion of people, renowned and less familiar, populate most pages. I did not know, for example, that some scientists think Genghis Khan might have been “good for the planet” (as a Guardian headline put it in 2011). He killed so many people that atmospheric CO2 went down.

The snippet of information that stood out for me, though, was the slogan “British First!”. Nowadays “buy British” is mostly suggestive of sustainability: it’s about low food miles (and patriotism). Yet in the 1920s the “British First!” injunction privileged Britain’s imperial domains. None of the ingredients in the Christmas pudding King George and Queen Mary ate in 1927 came from “foreign countries”. As for inventions, it’s refreshing to see air conditioning get the recognition it deserves as an instrument of environmental change, making it possible for dense populations to live in previously inhospitable places. The Earth Transformed is macro-history made up of innumerable mini-histories.

Frankopan’s subtitle is An untold history, which plays down decades of work by a burgeoning subfield of climate historians and environmental historians, for whom anthropogenic climate change, intensifying pressure on natural resources and deepening ecological degradation have firm roots in the past. For instance, deforestation and soil erosion in the Roman world, and the eminent figures who registered alarm (Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Plato – covered in chapter nine), is a well-known area of environmental history, highlighted back in 1864 by the American diplomat and polymath, George Perkins Marsh, in his path-breaking bookMan and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. (The title of the 1874 edition, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, anticipates Frankopan’s.)

The crash course Frankopan took to get up to speed with the latest scholarship, while hugely impressive, undercuts the purported untold-ness of environmental and climatic approaches to the past. The thousands of endnotes underscore how much work has been done by eminent interdisciplinary climate historians, environmental historians, ecological historians and environmental archaeologists and anthropologists. (Compulsive endnote checkers like me will feel short-changed by the exclusion of the references themselves. But so will anyone curious about what Frankopan has consulted. “The endnotes for this book are extremely extensive and run to more than 200 pages”, he explains. And so, “to spare the readers the extra weight of carrying these pages around, I decided to post all the notes on www.bloomsbury.com/theearthtransformed, where they can be downloaded, consulted and searched at leisure”. Including them in the book, granted, would have made the length unwieldy: the text alone amounts to 658 pages. But who, seriously, reads a book with an open laptop alongside?)

The Little Ice Age, for example, is the subject of recent books by John Brooke, Dagomar Degroot, Brian Fagan and Geoffrey Parker, which feature in Frankopan’s notes. Yet the reader would not know this from the text, as he omits the names of those he has read and quoted from. He refers to “one scholar” or “one historian”, or uses formulations such as “in the words of one leading historian”. For instance, he includes the notions of “ecological imperialism” and “portmanteau biota”, terms coined by the US environmental historian Alfred Crosby, who published landmark studies on the biological Europeanization of the Americas in 1972 and 1986. Yet Crosby is buried in the notes. Only a few times does Frankopan name historians: Fernand Braudel of the Annales school; “French historian Georges Duby”, in connection with imperial ambitions in India; Hubert Lamb, the climatologist with a sideline in history who coined the term “medieval warm epoch” in 1965 and published Climate: Present, past and future in 1972; Eric Williams (1944), regarding sugar cultivation’s degradation of Caribbean islands’ soil in the 18th century; and Monica Green (2020) on marmots as disease transmitters in medieval Central Asia, spreading plague in tandem with Mongol expansion. (The small rodents were a favourite Mongol food and pelt animal.) Of those named, Green is the only current practitioner. So why include her name, when hundreds of other historians are consigned to Bloomsbury’s website?

The history is not completely “untold” for the general reader either. The Earth Transformed follows in the footsteps of bestselling books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The fates of human societies (1997), in which the evolutionary biologist observed that “environment molds history”, and his equally sweeping Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed (2005), in which three of Diamond’s five criteria for failure are climate change, environmental damage and response to ecological problems. (The other challenges pinpointed are hostile neighbours and loss of friendly neighbours or trading partners.) The Earth Transformed also joins Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World: The environment and the collapse of great civilisations (2007; an updated and expanded version of the 1991 best-seller) and several books by the archaeologist and anthropologist Brian Fagan: Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the fate of civilizations (1999), The Long Summer: How climate changed civilization (2004), The Great Warming: Climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations (2008) and Climate Chaos: Lessons on survival from our ancestors (2021; co-authored with Nadia Durrani). Frankopan is just as erudite in several disciplines as his predecessors – and no less concerned with learning the lessons of history. But he decisively trumps the competition size-wise. The biggest, Collapse, runs to some 540 pages of text. Guns, Germs and Steel weighs in at under 500 and Ponting’s tome at just over 400. Fagan’s books are slender in comparison.

Comparing human impacts on planetary ecosystems to “rude guests who arrive at the last minute, cause havoc and set about destroying the house to which they have been invited”, Frankopan (like Diamond, Ponting and Fagan) is particularly intrigued by the collapse of empires, civilizations and societies that behave irresponsibly in ecological terms. Predictably, he regularly cautions that big is dangerous: the larger and more insatiable the society or city, the more precarious. The Roman empire’s ascendancy coincided with the Roman Climatic Optimum, just one example of what were “propitious climate conditions generally” for the formation of empires, from Indo-China to Central America. “Modern research” indicates that maize yields fall by up to 1 per cent for each day that air temperatures are above 30C, connecting hotter summers with civilizational instability in Mesoamerica. Frankopan covers so much terrain and tries to make so many links that various paragraph openers and connecting phrases soon recur: “It was a similar story elsewhere”; “Similar concerns were being raised elsewhere”; “Something similar was happening in”; “Then there was”; “It was not only”; “Much the same happened”; “This was just one of countless examples that shows”. That he is most at home in premodern times is beneficial for historians and general readers. Like most environmental historians, I’m most comfortable in the modern era. And so I found the chapters addressing the world before 1492 the most informative.

The Earth Transformed continues Frankopan’s mission (he is a professor of global history) to decentre the western world and foreground regions such as China, India, the Middle East and Central Asia. (Not that Diamond’s stance in Guns, Germs and Steel was narrowly European; it was Eurasian, and his coverage in Collapse ranges from Greenland to Rwanda and China to Montana). Chapter fourteen (“On the expansion of ecological horizons, c.1400–c.1500”) showcases the spectrum of “encounters with new worlds”, provincializing Europe and the familiar voyages of “discovery” to the Americas by exploring Ottoman moves eastward and Ming dynasty horizon-widening. That does not mean Frankopan leaves out the Columbian Exchange or the responsibility of pathogens such as influenza for die-offs of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Moreover, though he’s keen to challenge the hegemonic view of the past from the vantage point of the “global north”, attention to the environmental crisis of the 1960s is heavily American, singling out the Santa Barbara oil spill and the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio (both in 1969).

Frankopan’s book also marks an extension to the biotic world of his longstanding interest in exchanges and connectivity. Though influenced by Valerie Hansen’s argument in The Year 1000 (2020) that globalization processes kicked in about five centuries before Columbus’s and da Gama’s voyages, he pushes the start date back by another thousand years, noting regional trade networks’ proliferation c.2200–c.800 BC.

Volcanic eruptions not only epitomize the global repercussions of natural events, but also exemplify natural forces’ gargantuan brute strength. The eruption of Thera (aka Santorini) volcano in the Aegean c.1600 BC packed the punch of “two million atomic bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima”. The biggest eruption in the past two million years, Mount Toba in Indonesia, cast severe volcanic winter over the northern hemisphere for years. During the Roman Climatic Optimum, c.300 BC–AD 500, eruptions in the tropics disrupted the Nile’s flow in Ptolemaic Egypt, threatening the breadbasket of the Mediterranean’s dependence on the river’s annual floods. Volcanic cataclysm features in Norse mythology: Ragnarök is an epic battle at the end of the world, preceded by a terrible winter. Of the superhero film Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Frankopan observes that moviegoers “may not realise that they have a set of volcanic eruptions [on Iceland] a millennium and a half ago to thank for their thrills”. The “machine-gun effect” of eruptions in Iceland and Japan inflicted, among other disasters, one of the worst famines in Japanese history. (Acid spikes in ice cores provide telling evidence.) When Laki blew its top in Iceland (1783), the consequences – drought, famine – were felt as far away as Egypt. Given the amount of space he rightly devotes to vulcanism, but also to nature’s fragility and vulnerability in human hands, Frankopan might have pointed out that eruptions represent nature apart from human influence: uncontrollable, untameable and uncolonizable.

Not that he ever insists that volcanic activity is deterministic. The impact on the Mediterranean world of the multiple eruptions of Alaska’s Okmok volcano in 43–42 BC was extensively chronicled: sunlight became feeble and fruit withered on the trees. Whether these eruptions’ fallouts were the main reason for Cleopatra’s fall and the Roman annexation of Egypt is unclear. Frankopan’s judicious assessment is that they confronted the Egyptian queen with yet another headache. While other forms of environmental and climatic upheaval indisputably factor into political, social and economic convulsions, isolating their role more precisely is difficult. Most likely, they exacerbated existing problems. One of Frankopan’s most striking examples of how historians and the general reader alike ignore the natural world at their peril concerns a matter that may seem strictly human. Research published in 2015 correlated the incidence of antisemitism in European cities from 1100 to 1800 with a one-third of 1C fall in average growing-season temperatures. “Weather shocks” and rising persecution were intertwined; when food was scarce and prices were high, the likelihood of physical assault rose.

Frankopan has done the sterling, even heroic job of making readily available much of the bountiful harvest of research in climate and environmental history. For thousands of aficionados of door-stopper history books, this one is likely to be their introduction to climate and environmental history. If there’s a gap in his coverage worth mentioning, then it’s the Anthropocene, a notion that’s practically unavoidable in current discourse about our planet’s condition. It denotes a unit of time on the geological scale that many scientists (and other scholars) attach to the most recent epoch we’ve been living in, during which human impacts on the biosphere have been so profound that our species is tantamount to a geological force. Frankopan mentions it a few times, but evidently decided against full engagement, which would require discussion of alternative terms – Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Wasteocene – and the debate over the epoch’s onset. (Some go for 1945, the testing and dropping of atomic bombs having left a worldwide residue of radionuclides; others opt for the transition from hunter-gatherer lifeways to agricultural settlement, 12,000 years ago. Another popular starting point is steam engine-induced mass industrialization, which triggered the widespread burning of fossil fuels.) The Anthropocene debate highlights that literacy in the natural sciences is indispensable for climate historians and many environmental historians. And Frankopan cogently publicizes the “climate archives” they work with, such as ice cores (trapped air bubbles house data about lead smelting and burning of fossil fuels), fossilized pollen, growth rings in trees, carbonized seeds and cave speleothems (mineral deposit accumulation reveals rainfall and temperature variations).

In an interview with BBC History Magazine in 2020, when asked what makes an excellent global history book, Frankopan replied that “really good history should ensure that it satisfies the general reader and avoids making academic historians get their pencils out to crossly underline everything”. Well, I underlined many things, but never in anger. To dwell on the astonishingly few minor errors would be churlish, but someone, surely, should have picked up that Edward Teller is actually “father of the hydrogen bomb”, not “father of the atomic bomb”. And after getting the direction of travel for smallpox right everywhere else, on one occasion it’s stated that smallpox travelled from Europe to the Americas, not vice versa. (Perhaps syphilis, mentioned two pages earlier, was meant.)

In the author’s view the historian should puncture claims of novelty and uniqueness. Floods, droughts, famines, climate change, soil erosion, deforestation and wildlife depletion are indeed nothing new. Enormous transformations, seemingly unprecedented, are the norm. Projected early-twenty-first-century temperature rises of 1.5C–2C, he notes, “are modest in the grand scheme of climatic change … and look paltry indeed compared to the very many and regular double-digit rises and falls that have occurred in the past”. Deep-time earth history can breed complacency – or resignation: there’s little new under the sun, and we’ve faced similar, and bigger, challenges before. But Frankopan is anything but complacent. He appreciates that human impact on the non-human over the past 100 years or so has been truly unprecedented; as John McNeill titled his environmental history of the twentieth century, Something New Under the Sun (2001).

In an effort to explain how we arrived at our current quandary, Peter Frankopan begins and ends with (rather hackneyed) images of earthly paradise and paradise lost, referencing John Milton’s epic poem and the Book of Genesis. What, he ponders on his penultimate page, are the chances of regaining paradise? As he has argued that worries, warnings and attempts to curb destructiveness, like despoliation itself, are nothing new, he whacks the ball decisively into his reader’s court. As our species careens toward the cliff edge, “We cannot say…that we were not warned”.

Stacking the Shelves #13

Stacking The Shelves is a meme hosted by Reading Reality all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks! I’ve been intentionally not picking any new books up for a couple of weeks, because I once…

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Climate deniers love to toss back the line, “Yeah, climate is always changing.” They have no idea.

The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan is a comprehensive history of Earth’s ever-changing climate, none of it more fascinating than the last few thousand years when humans started to interfere.  Before a keen focus on the impact modern humans have had on climate, Frankopan gallops through Earth’s enormous transformation in its first few billion years. 4.6 billion years ago, Earth was…

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My 2023 in books. Part I

Okay. This is going to be long. Sorry. This year was fucking horrible. But I had readings so... here they go. These are all personal opinions, it is worth remembering.

January

Circe -  Madeline Miller   ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5 

I loved this book, I already knew it because it was a reread. I am a sucker for a good retelling. There is something very deep in Circe's story, her feeling of rejection, her unreceived love, her loneliness, her power. It made me cry, laugh. Sometimes I identify with Circe. I wish I could say more, but sometimes silence fills more space.

“But there was no wound she could give me that I had not already given myself.” 

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World - Peter Frankopan ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5 

It is a non-fiction book. In my daily life I read a lot of academic texts, whether for work or studies, so when it comes to leisure I tend to stay away from these books. But Frankopan does not fail to capture the reader's attention and question the changes that are taking place in the world and where the future is going, especially if we start to analyze our consumption of natural resources. It is an important book.

Anna Karenina -Leo Tolstoy ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐  5/5 

Ok, they are right in saying that it is one of the best novels in the world. I read it in high school, I didn't give it any importance. This year I read it again. I fell in love. I love this book because it is…human. Each part of the book gives us a lesson about what it means to have defects and isn't there anything more human than that? Each part of the book gives us beauty but also the cruelty of reality, linked to political themes, morality, gender, and social class.

“Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.”

The Cruel Prince - Holly Black  ⭐⭐ 2/5

yeah...

February

The Song of Achilles-  Madeline Miller ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐  5/5

I was obviously going to read this book. I arrived late to the hype. But for me, it was worth it. I am a sucker for love stories. I know that many do not like this interpretation. But that's an interpretation, and I like it. It is a story of pain. And love is often pain, although it shouldn't be. Wars are also pain. It is a war story. And as the Pat Benatar song “Love Is a Battlefield” says. So.. yeah.

“Have you no more memories?" I am made of memories. "Speak, then.” 

They Both Die at the End- Adam Silvera ⭐⭐⭐  3/5 

I freaking loved the premise of this book. Made me cry? Yes. I enjoyed it yes. It left a strange void in my heart, yes. But it also left me with a feeling of anticlimax. I think it deals with important themes, found family is one of them, and it was quite unexpected. 

“...stories can make someone immortal as long as someone else is willing to listen.”

After Dark - Haruki Murakami ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐  5/5

Ugh. This book. Murakami's damn dual narrative always wins me over. This book squeezed my heart, it is the story of two sisters. Like all Murakami books, it challenges reality in a way that only he can do. The story is a journey of colors through a city at night and takes place between reality and dream. What more could you want?.

 “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel.” 

March

Normal People - Sally Rooney⭐⭐⭐⭐4/5

I really enjoyed this book. Sally is the millennial writer by definition. I love her. It is a book that explores academic privilege, issues of class and social division. But it also explores a frustrating relationship with a lack of communication. Important issues such as substance abuse, family violence emerge. It is a love story at times lonely, at times pretentious. Sally knows how to write characters you love to hate. I ended up crying. The adaptation of the series is very good, in fact at times it is even better than the book itself.

“He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her. ” 

Conversations with friends - Sally Rooney ⭐⭐⭐3/5

I liked. But I couldn't empathize with the characters. Rooney's writing is still very good and I like it. I hate Nick, he makes me want to throw up. Maybe that's the point of the book. The adaptation to the series, as with Normal People, seemed perfect to me, in this case I enjoyed it more than the book, I still hated Nick. I think the dialogues are very intelligent and that makes it an interesting and very bearable text.

"Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through."

Klara and the Sun-  Kazuo Ishiguro ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5

MY FAVORITE BOOK OF THE YEAR. It's obviously by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro has been one of my favorite authors for several years. It is a dystopian book but one that provides calm. The book is narrated by an Artificial Intelligence. Ishiguro does science fiction like no one else, he brings humanity and mystery to each story. This book reduced me to tears. Every line is intentional. It's a beautiful book.

“Hope,’ he said. ‘Damn thing never leaves you alone.”

“I suppose I’m saying Josie and I will always be together at some level, some deeper one, even if we go out there and don’t see each other any more. I can’t speak for her. But once I’m out there, I know I’ll always keep searching for someone just like her.”

 “Do you believe in the human heart? Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and unique? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?”

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt⭐⭐⭐ 3/5

I liked it, but when I finished it I felt relieved. It is a book that at the beginning catches you and leaves you breathless. It made me stop for a while and say: ugh, how dense, how strong everything is. How sad, almost poetically beautiful and tragic. But then, I got tired. It made me cry a little (a recurring theme in all the books I read it seems)

“I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle”

A history of the impact of Earth's climate on human civilizations over millenia. An explanation of how human activity over the past 200 years or so is producing climatic change in a fundamentally different way, with disastrous global consequences. It's a well-written and informative book.

Historian Peter Frankopan discusses climate change and his new book ‘The Earth Transformed’

In his newest book, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, Oxford historian Peter Frankopan traverses a large span, geographically and traditionally, to map the function of climate within the historical past of civilisation. Through the story of the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires and colonies, he argues that humanity’s present engagement with international warming isn’t new and the makes…

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By Peter Coates

“Most people”, Peter Frankopan remarks, “can name the great leaders and major battles in the past, but few can name the biggest storms, the most significant floods, the worst winters, the most severe droughts, or the ways that these influenced harvest failures, provoked political pressures or were catalysts in the spread of disease.” Environmental and climatic perspectives are not encountered nearly enough by history undergraduates – and remain absent from school curricula. “By and large”, he contends, “the weather, climate and environmental factors have rarely been seen as a backdrop to human history, let alone as an important lens through which to view the past … In the main … we ignore climate and long-run climate patterns or changes altogether when we look at history.”

Frankopan’s previous books, The Silk Roads: A new history of the world (2015) and The New Silk Roads: The present and future of the world (2018), were widely acclaimed for dazzling fresh perspectives on world history crafted in unputdownable style: big popular history at its best. In The Earth Transformed he turns to an even more epic historical saga: what we as a species have done to our home, planet earth. Starting at the dawn of time, ages before the first hominins appeared, Frankopan leaves us in the present. En route he leaps from the Iberian peninsula to the Indus Valley, from the waving wheat of the alluvial plains of ninth-century BC Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to the swaying corn of the twenty-first-century US Great Plains. A dizzying array of topics, events and themes unfold (accompanied by thirty-eight colour images, thirteen maps and seven charts). Among them are: the “Great Dying’”of marine and terrestrial biota after an extreme volcanic “episode” in present-day Siberia 252 million years ago; extinctions of megafauna such as the sabre-toothed tiger; deglaciation that submerged a third of Australia’s landmass 19,000 years ago; the Scandinavian peoples’ ninth- and tenth-century spread to Iceland, the Faroes and Greenland during the “medieval warm period” thanks to ice-free sailing, the northward migration of fish stocks and better cultivation potential (the name Greenland was not entirely down to Erik the Red’s cynical boosterism); the climate-shaped collapse of cotton prices and regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad; the horse culture of pastoralist nomadic empires in the grasslands of Kazakhstan and Mongolia; El Niño-driven patterns of alternating periods of flooding and drought in sixth-century South America; the “malaria premium” – the particular desirability as slave labour of male Africans in their early twenties from regions of the continent where resistance to malaria was highest; climate-based racial hierarchies underpinning the slave trade and plantation economy in the Americas; the dovetailing of the colonization of nature and of indigenes; and the role of thick mud in frustrating the Ottoman attempt to take Vienna in the autumn of 1529.

Frankopan also finds space for the eco-credentials, respectively, of Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism; how earthquakes and disease aggravated end-of-the-world prophecies, and the ramifications of environmental traumas for the authority of religious institutions; the killing of nearly two billion sparrows in China in 1959, a massacre that backfired spectacularly, bringing chronic food shortages (sparrows ate more insects than ears of grain); Soviet efforts under Stalin, and in China under Mao, to improve on nature’s stingy provision and reconstruct the earth in a frenzied catch-up with the capitalist West; mid-twentieth-century efforts in the US and the USSR to manipulate the weather, such as burning forests to stimulate rain, hoping that the heated air would encourage cloud formation; and horror stories about invasive non-native species such as brown tree snakes in Guam and Asian longhorn beetles in North America. There is also room for the eco-fears that haunted his boyhood: acid rain (brought to his attention on John Craven’s Newsround), the threat of nuclear winter and the shock of Chernobyl.

Occasionally it feels a bit second-hand. A quotation (1898) from the illustrious US national park advocate John Muir, for example, is sourced from a book about hiking, nudism and nature conservation in Germany. On the whole, though, The Earth Transformed is a superb synthesis of the findings of a bevy of books and bewildering number of specialist articles. The latter are drawn from archaeology, anthropology and geography as well as historical studies, but many were published in science journals, among them not just Nature and Science, but International Journal of Climatology, Journal of Spectroscopy, Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, Bulletin of Vulcanology and Living Reviews in Solar Physics. The book is replete with fascinating facts and staggering statistics (in 1959, during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, “twelve times more earth was moved in a single week than during the construction of the Panama canal”). Eye-popping events, incredible inventions and a profusion of people, renowned and less familiar, populate most pages. I did not know, for example, that some scientists think Genghis Khan might have been “good for the planet” (as a Guardian headline put it in 2011). He killed so many people that atmospheric CO2 went down.

The snippet of information that stood out for me, though, was the slogan “British First!”. Nowadays “buy British” is mostly suggestive of sustainability: it’s about low food miles (and patriotism). Yet in the 1920s the “British First!” injunction privileged Britain’s imperial domains. None of the ingredients in the Christmas pudding King George and Queen Mary ate in 1927 came from “foreign countries”. As for inventions, it’s refreshing to see air conditioning get the recognition it deserves as an instrument of environmental change, making it possible for dense populations to live in previously inhospitable places. The Earth Transformed is macro-history made up of innumerable mini-histories.

Frankopan’s subtitle is An untold history, which plays down decades of work by a burgeoning subfield of climate historians and environmental historians, for whom anthropogenic climate change, intensifying pressure on natural resources and deepening ecological degradation have firm roots in the past. For instance, deforestation and soil erosion in the Roman world, and the eminent figures who registered alarm (Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Plato – covered in chapter nine), is a well-known area of environmental history, highlighted back in 1864 by the American diplomat and polymath, George Perkins Marsh, in his path-breaking bookMan and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. (The title of the 1874 edition, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, anticipates Frankopan’s.)

The crash course Frankopan took to get up to speed with the latest scholarship, while hugely impressive, undercuts the purported untold-ness of environmental and climatic approaches to the past. The thousands of endnotes underscore how much work has been done by eminent interdisciplinary climate historians, environmental historians, ecological historians and environmental archaeologists and anthropologists. (Compulsive endnote checkers like me will feel short-changed by the exclusion of the references themselves. But so will anyone curious about what Frankopan has consulted. “The endnotes for this book are extremely extensive and run to more than 200 pages”, he explains. And so, “to spare the readers the extra weight of carrying these pages around, I decided to post all the notes on www.bloomsbury.com/theearthtransformed, where they can be downloaded, consulted and searched at leisure”. Including them in the book, granted, would have made the length unwieldy: the text alone amounts to 658 pages. But who, seriously, reads a book with an open laptop alongside?)

The Little Ice Age, for example, is the subject of recent books by John Brooke, Dagomar Degroot, Brian Fagan and Geoffrey Parker, which feature in Frankopan’s notes. Yet the reader would not know this from the text, as he omits the names of those he has read and quoted from. He refers to “one scholar” or “one historian”, or uses formulations such as “in the words of one leading historian”. For instance, he includes the notions of “ecological imperialism” and “portmanteau biota”, terms coined by the US environmental historian Alfred Crosby, who published landmark studies on the biological Europeanization of the Americas in 1972 and 1986. Yet Crosby is buried in the notes. Only a few times does Frankopan name historians: Fernand Braudel of the Annales school; “French historian Georges Duby”, in connection with imperial ambitions in India; Hubert Lamb, the climatologist with a sideline in history who coined the term “medieval warm epoch” in 1965 and published Climate: Present, past and future in 1972; Eric Williams (1944), regarding sugar cultivation’s degradation of Caribbean islands’ soil in the 18th century; and Monica Green (2020) on marmots as disease transmitters in medieval Central Asia, spreading plague in tandem with Mongol expansion. (The small rodents were a favourite Mongol food and pelt animal.) Of those named, Green is the only current practitioner. So why include her name, when hundreds of other historians are consigned to Bloomsbury’s website?

The history is not completely “untold” for the general reader either. The Earth Transformed follows in the footsteps of bestselling books such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The fates of human societies (1997), in which the evolutionary biologist observed that “environment molds history”, and his equally sweeping Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed (2005), in which three of Diamond’s five criteria for failure are climate change, environmental damage and response to ecological problems. (The other challenges pinpointed are hostile neighbours and loss of friendly neighbours or trading partners.) The Earth Transformed also joins Clive Ponting’s A New Green History of the World: The environment and the collapse of great civilisations (2007; an updated and expanded version of the 1991 best-seller) and several books by the archaeologist and anthropologist Brian Fagan: Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the fate of civilizations (1999), The Long Summer: How climate changed civilization (2004), The Great Warming: Climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations (2008) and Climate Chaos: Lessons on survival from our ancestors (2021; co-authored with Nadia Durrani). Frankopan is just as erudite in several disciplines as his predecessors – and no less concerned with learning the lessons of history. But he decisively trumps the competition size-wise. The biggest, Collapse, runs to some 540 pages of text. Guns, Germs and Steel weighs in at under 500 and Ponting’s tome at just over 400. Fagan’s books are slender in comparison.

Comparing human impacts on planetary ecosystems to “rude guests who arrive at the last minute, cause havoc and set about destroying the house to which they have been invited”, Frankopan (like Diamond, Ponting and Fagan) is particularly intrigued by the collapse of empires, civilizations and societies that behave irresponsibly in ecological terms. Predictably, he regularly cautions that big is dangerous: the larger and more insatiable the society or city, the more precarious. The Roman empire’s ascendancy coincided with the Roman Climatic Optimum, just one example of what were “propitious climate conditions generally” for the formation of empires, from Indo-China to Central America. “Modern research” indicates that maize yields fall by up to 1 per cent for each day that air temperatures are above 30C, connecting hotter summers with civilizational instability in Mesoamerica. Frankopan covers so much terrain and tries to make so many links that various paragraph openers and connecting phrases soon recur: “It was a similar story elsewhere”; “Similar concerns were being raised elsewhere”; “Something similar was happening in”; “Then there was”; “It was not only”; “Much the same happened”; “This was just one of countless examples that shows”. That he is most at home in premodern times is beneficial for historians and general readers. Like most environmental historians, I’m most comfortable in the modern era. And so I found the chapters addressing the world before 1492 the most informative.

The Earth Transformed continues Frankopan’s mission (he is a professor of global history) to decentre the western world and foreground regions such as China, India, the Middle East and Central Asia. (Not that Diamond’s stance in Guns, Germs and Steel was narrowly European; it was Eurasian, and his coverage in Collapse ranges from Greenland to Rwanda and China to Montana). Chapter fourteen (“On the expansion of ecological horizons, c.1400–c.1500”) showcases the spectrum of “encounters with new worlds”, provincializing Europe and the familiar voyages of “discovery” to the Americas by exploring Ottoman moves eastward and Ming dynasty horizon-widening. That does not mean Frankopan leaves out the Columbian Exchange or the responsibility of pathogens such as influenza for die-offs of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Moreover, though he’s keen to challenge the hegemonic view of the past from the vantage point of the “global north”, attention to the environmental crisis of the 1960s is heavily American, singling out the Santa Barbara oil spill and the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio (both in 1969).

Frankopan’s book also marks an extension to the biotic world of his longstanding interest in exchanges and connectivity. Though influenced by Valerie Hansen’s argument in The Year 1000 (2020) that globalization processes kicked in about five centuries before Columbus’s and da Gama’s voyages, he pushes the start date back by another thousand years, noting regional trade networks’ proliferation c.2200–c.800 BC.

Volcanic eruptions not only epitomize the global repercussions of natural events, but also exemplify natural forces’ gargantuan brute strength. The eruption of Thera (aka Santorini) volcano in the Aegean c.1600 BC packed the punch of “two million atomic bombs of the type dropped on Hiroshima”. The biggest eruption in the past two million years, Mount Toba in Indonesia, cast severe volcanic winter over the northern hemisphere for years. During the Roman Climatic Optimum, c.300 BC–AD 500, eruptions in the tropics disrupted the Nile’s flow in Ptolemaic Egypt, threatening the breadbasket of the Mediterranean’s dependence on the river’s annual floods. Volcanic cataclysm features in Norse mythology: Ragnarök is an epic battle at the end of the world, preceded by a terrible winter. Of the superhero film Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Frankopan observes that moviegoers “may not realise that they have a set of volcanic eruptions [on Iceland] a millennium and a half ago to thank for their thrills”. The “machine-gun effect” of eruptions in Iceland and Japan inflicted, among other disasters, one of the worst famines in Japanese history. (Acid spikes in ice cores provide telling evidence.) When Laki blew its top in Iceland (1783), the consequences – drought, famine – were felt as far away as Egypt. Given the amount of space he rightly devotes to vulcanism, but also to nature’s fragility and vulnerability in human hands, Frankopan might have pointed out that eruptions represent nature apart from human influence: uncontrollable, untameable and uncolonizable.

Not that he ever insists that volcanic activity is deterministic. The impact on the Mediterranean world of the multiple eruptions of Alaska’s Okmok volcano in 43–42 BC was extensively chronicled: sunlight became feeble and fruit withered on the trees. Whether these eruptions’ fallouts were the main reason for Cleopatra’s fall and the Roman annexation of Egypt is unclear. Frankopan’s judicious assessment is that they confronted the Egyptian queen with yet another headache. While other forms of environmental and climatic upheaval indisputably factor into political, social and economic convulsions, isolating their role more precisely is difficult. Most likely, they exacerbated existing problems. One of Frankopan’s most striking examples of how historians and the general reader alike ignore the natural world at their peril concerns a matter that may seem strictly human. Research published in 2015 correlated the incidence of antisemitism in European cities from 1100 to 1800 with a one-third of 1C fall in average growing-season temperatures. “Weather shocks” and rising persecution were intertwined; when food was scarce and prices were high, the likelihood of physical assault rose.

Frankopan has done the sterling, even heroic job of making readily available much of the bountiful harvest of research in climate and environmental history. For thousands of aficionados of door-stopper history books, this one is likely to be their introduction to climate and environmental history. If there’s a gap in his coverage worth mentioning, then it’s the Anthropocene, a notion that’s practically unavoidable in current discourse about our planet’s condition. It denotes a unit of time on the geological scale that many scientists (and other scholars) attach to the most recent epoch we’ve been living in, during which human impacts on the biosphere have been so profound that our species is tantamount to a geological force. Frankopan mentions it a few times, but evidently decided against full engagement, which would require discussion of alternative terms – Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Wasteocene – and the debate over the epoch’s onset. (Some go for 1945, the testing and dropping of atomic bombs having left a worldwide residue of radionuclides; others opt for the transition from hunter-gatherer lifeways to agricultural settlement, 12,000 years ago. Another popular starting point is steam engine-induced mass industrialization, which triggered the widespread burning of fossil fuels.) The Anthropocene debate highlights that literacy in the natural sciences is indispensable for climate historians and many environmental historians. And Frankopan cogently publicizes the “climate archives” they work with, such as ice cores (trapped air bubbles house data about lead smelting and burning of fossil fuels), fossilized pollen, growth rings in trees, carbonized seeds and cave speleothems (mineral deposit accumulation reveals rainfall and temperature variations).

In an interview with BBC History Magazine in 2020, when asked what makes an excellent global history book, Frankopan replied that “really good history should ensure that it satisfies the general reader and avoids making academic historians get their pencils out to crossly underline everything”. Well, I underlined many things, but never in anger. To dwell on the astonishingly few minor errors would be churlish, but someone, surely, should have picked up that Edward Teller is actually “father of the hydrogen bomb”, not “father of the atomic bomb”. And after getting the direction of travel for smallpox right everywhere else, on one occasion it’s stated that smallpox travelled from Europe to the Americas, not vice versa. (Perhaps syphilis, mentioned two pages earlier, was meant.)

In the author’s view the historian should puncture claims of novelty and uniqueness. Floods, droughts, famines, climate change, soil erosion, deforestation and wildlife depletion are indeed nothing new. Enormous transformations, seemingly unprecedented, are the norm. Projected early-twenty-first-century temperature rises of 1.5C–2C, he notes, “are modest in the grand scheme of climatic change … and look paltry indeed compared to the very many and regular double-digit rises and falls that have occurred in the past”. Deep-time earth history can breed complacency – or resignation: there’s little new under the sun, and we’ve faced similar, and bigger, challenges before. But Frankopan is anything but complacent. He appreciates that human impact on the non-human over the past 100 years or so has been truly unprecedented; as John McNeill titled his environmental history of the twentieth century, Something New Under the Sun (2001).

In an effort to explain how we arrived at our current quandary, Peter Frankopan begins and ends with (rather hackneyed) images of earthly paradise and paradise lost, referencing John Milton’s epic poem and the Book of Genesis. What, he ponders on his penultimate page, are the chances of regaining paradise? As he has argued that worries, warnings and attempts to curb destructiveness, like despoliation itself, are nothing new, he whacks the ball decisively into his reader’s court. As our species careens toward the cliff edge, “We cannot say…that we were not warned”.

"Die neuen Seidenstraßen" - Peter Frankopan

La Primera Cruzada: La llamada de Oriente - Peter Frankopan (2022)

Revela la historia de la Primera Cruzada jamás contada a través del prisma de Oriente Según la tradición, la Primera Cruzada comenzó por instigación del papa Urbano II y culminó en julio de 1099, cuando miles de caballeros de Europa occidental liberaron Jerusalén de la creciente amenaza del islam. Pero ¿y si el verdadero catalizador de la Primera Cruzada se encontrase más al este de…

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read a professionally published short story a few years back and went huh. this seems familiar. it was about the first crusade, set in the space of time when the crusaders had successfully breached the walls of antioch and captured the city only to become besieged in turn by the seljuk turks who were coming to relieve the city. it was about faith, and starvation, and the discovery of the supposed holy lance in st peters basilica, and ghosts, and it was very good. anyway the reason it was familiar was because it was a rewrite of the author's hetalia fanfic that i read on livejournal in 2009.

2023's Best Books

I meant to do this a few days ago so there was more time before the holidays, but here's a quick list of the best books that I read that were released in 2023. Obviously, I didn't read every book that came out this year, and I'm only listing the best books I read that were actually released in the 2023 calendar year.

In my opinion, the two very best books released in 2023 were An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford by Richard Norton Smith (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), and True West: Sam Shepard's Life, Work, and Times by Robert Greenfield (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO).

(The rest of this list is in no particular order)

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier C.W. Goodyear (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

The World: A Family History of Humanity Simon Sebag Montefiore (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

France On Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain Julian Jackson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth Adam Goodheart (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World Mary Beard (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

City of Echoes: A New History of Rome, Its Popes, and Its People Jessica Wärnberg (BOOK | KINDLE)

We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World Alex Rowell (BOOK | KINDLE)

Edison's Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History's Greatest Geniuses Katie Spalding (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias Kevin Cook (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

The Summer of 1876: Outlaws, Lawmen, and Legends in the Season That Defined the American West Chris Wimmer (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

King: A Life Jonathan Eig (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

LBJ's America: The Life and Legacies of Lyndon Baines Johnson Edited by Mark Atwood Lawrence and Mark K. Updegrove (BOOK | KINDLE)

Who Believes Is Not Alone: My Life Beside Benedict XVI Georg Gänswein with Saverio Gaeta (BOOK | KINDLE)

Eighteen Days in October: The Yom Kippur War and How It Created the Modern Middle East Uri Kaufman (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Friendship That Changed American History Laurence Jurdem (BOOK | KINDLE)

White House Wild Child: How Alice Roosevelt Broke All the Rules and Won the Heart of America Shelley Fraser Mickle (BOOK | KINDLE)

Romney: A Reckoning McKay Coppins (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics H.W. Brands (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Peter Frankopan (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

LeBron Jeff Benedict (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America Abraham Riesman (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House Chris Whipple (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO)

Explore my bookshelf!

Thanks for the tag, @theghostinthemargins, this is fun!

An estimate of how many physical books I own: By my count, 396. Split between fiction, nonfiction, and travel guides.

Favourite author: I would say Tolkien! My three favourite books, all tied for first place are The Silmarillion/LOTR (I refuse to separate them), Les Misérables, and Jane Eyre. They’re the ones I can reread an uncountable number of times and never get tired of, and they all speak things that I find true and meaningful. But Victor Hugo and Charlotte Brontë have written other things I don’t care for as much, so Tolkien would be my overall favourite author.

A popular book I've never read and never intend to read: I’m sure there are a lot, I don’t tend to really get into a lot of contemporary non-speculative-fiction novels.

A popular book I thought was just meh: The Queen’s Thief series didn’t really catch me after the first two books, so I stopped. Though I didn’t catch all the twists in the first one, I felt a lot of it was telegraphed too heavily and I’d read another book that did the same thing but better. And the writing style didn’t pull me in; at times in the second one it felt like I was reading a Cliff Notes summary of the book rather than the book itself, or a brief history textbook from the book’s world. It’s a shame because I liked the relationship twist, I wanted to be into the book, but I wasn’t.

Longest book I own: Probably Complete Shakespeare (1164 pages in small font) in word count. Les Mis has more pages (1222) but larger font. My World Book Encyclopedia for the letter ‘A’ is probably also a contender in total word count (980 pages, small font, larger pages than the others).

Longest series I own all the books to: Either The Stormlight Archive or A Song of Ice and Fire depending on whether we’re going by word count or number of books.

Prettiest book I own: I’m very fond of The World of Ice and Fire, it’s a real visual treat. Fandom is making me want to invest in an illustrated Silm or LOTR. I’d have bought the nice version of Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea if shipping costs weren’t so ridiculous, it’s gorgeous and I love it, but I really can’t justify a hundred-dollar price tag when I already own the ebook.

A book or series I wish more people knew about: Several recommendations, including Piranesi (gorgeous, fantastical writing, some of the most beautiful and creative fantasy I’ve read in a while), The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (excellent vampire story, the only one I’ve seen that is as good as or better than the original Dracula, and plays off the original’s use of documents (diaries, letters, etc.) by having three histories nested within each other: the main character, her father in the ‘70s, and his thesis advisor in the ‘30s). If you enjoy the way The Historian is written even apart from the vampires, you will probably also love People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, which tells the story of an old and precious book and the Jewish families who owned it through history, via the modern plot of a woman carrying out document analysis of it the book the context of the 1990s Yugoslavian wars. It is very, very good.

For non-fiction, some recs are:

The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 by Christopher Ehret, the best textbook on pre-colonial African history I’ve found, extremely interesting

The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, a history through the lens of Eurasian connections (the parts between the fall of the Roman Empire and the later Middle Ages were especially interesting and novel - did you know Ethiopia invaded the Arabian peninsula? or that there was a Jewish (converted) state in Central Asia? or all kinds of stuff about the Zoroastrians?)

Paris 1919: Margaret MacMillan’s breakdown of the personalities involved in the Treaty of Versailles, and how their decisions set the stage for the rest of the 20th century; still a classic.

If you’re at all interested in Canadian history or in the Great Depression, and want to see how bad it can get in a country that didn’t have an FDR, Pierre Berton’s The Great Depression is a brilliant, passionate, and scathing text on that period in Canada, with a lot of idiots and brutes in power and some truly inspirational figures outside of power.

If you’re interested in US Reconstruction history, Capitol Men is a great book on the first Black members of Congress post-civil-war.

Book I'm reading now: Jurassic Park, Agrarian Socialism (about the rise of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a socialist party that gave rise to the present-day social democratic NDP; I’ve gotten stalled, I need to finish this), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, History of Middle-earth vol 9 Sauron Defeated (I got it out of the library for the epilogue and I’ve read that, but I want to check out The Notion Club Papers before I return it), and just finished a reread of Mansfield Park.

Book that's been on my TBR list for a while but I still haven't got around to it: Shantaram; it’s a novel based on the author’s very eventful life.

Do you have any books in a language other than English: Have yes, have read, no. 😔 In various fits of ambition I’ve bought Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Journey to the Centre of the Earth in the original French, as well as a couple French-language histories, with the intent of using them to practice, and then my French is too weak and I just don’t stick to it. I’m only a few chapters i to any of them. Les Mis is too much for me to do more than try to enjoy a handful of passages in the original, but I really would like to finish Journey to the Centre of the Earth and one of the histories that interests me.

Paperback, hardcover, or ebook?

Mainly paperbook or ebook. I prefer reading paperbacks, it’s easier to focus and better for my eyes than ebooks (screentime is…most of my waking hours, it’s not good) and I find it more enjoyable, but ebooks have the benefit of convenience and being very fast to acquire; if I want to read a new release right away and the ebook is cheap, I’ll take it over the hardcover. I’ve only purchased 23 ebooks but have a huge stash of free ones from Project Gutenberg.

some good things,

I've been back at work for a week and a half, and things are going fairly well. Last week was a nice slow easing back into things to prepare me for the meeting hell and massive levels of interdepartmental and interpersonal drama this week. :/

I've gotten to get back to the things I love. After dinner evening walks with Derek, enjoying the golden evening sunlight and nice weather. Long cuddle sessions with Westin every afternoon while I work. Homemade iced green tea or tea lattes in the morning. Seeing my friends. The weather is nice outside, so I'm back to taking Westin out in the front and back yard with his leash and harness.

I did my planting in my raised garden bed for this year. :) Mint, Thai basil, sage, grape tomato, cilantro, and green beans.

Chicken wings were on huge sale this weekend at the grocery store. I normally don't buy wings because they're like $20 for a pack of 3 pounds of wings. They were down to $3 or $4 for a pack of 3 pounds, so I bought wings for the first time in over a year. Chicken wings are legit one of my favorite foods, and it was so nice to have them again!

I've been back to my regularly scheduled running and swimming and it feels so good. I've been listening to The Silk Road: A New History of the Old World, by Peter Frankopan, and it's a good, steady, calm, and interesting running book.

I'm also listening to Yellowface, the latest by RF Kuang (author of The Poppy War and Babel, both of which I ADORED) right now, and this book is incredible. RF Kuang never misses.

I finished Season 2 of The Wire, which I liked just as much as Season 1.

Writing has been going well, and I got to do a lot of it over the weekend and this week so far. ❤️

I feel like you’ve been asked this before so apologies in advance, but: what is your favorite book about history that is not about your speciality in history?

Hmm. Some excellent nonfiction and/or history books that I have recently read or think are just really worth reading include:

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson (and frankly most of what he writes)

Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera

Chernobyl by Serhii Plokhy (and again, most of what he writes)

Ghostland by Colin Dickey

In the Kingdom of Ice by Hampton Sides

The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Nonfiction history books on the TBR list that I am excited about include:

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann

Prisoners of the Castle by Ben Macintyre

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis

The Ship Beneath The Ice by Mensun Bound