Just getting this posted under the wire, since it’s barely still January, but I’ve been busy writing and publishing. I just released the eighth book in my Garrison Gage series, A Cold and Shallow Shore. I’ve got a big chunk of a fun shorter book written that I hope to finish in the next month or so before I turn my attention to the third Karen Pantelli book. Already got some notes sketched out on that one. My muse sometimes has other ideas, but I’m trying to adhere a bit more to a publishing schedule this year, as well as be a bit more disciplined in my project selection. See how that goes.
That picture of Rosie on our side patio above is from a few weeks ago, when there was quite a bit of snow on the ground, but it’s actually so bright and sunny outside my office window today that it looks like summer out there. It’s cold, though, dipping down into the 20s at night. It was nice to have our daughter home for a few weeks over the winter break, though she’s back at OSU now and already dealing with midterms. My son just finished the first semester of his sophomore year of high school, as the school, waylaid by the Omicron variant like so many other places, struggled to keep both teachers and students in the classroom and limped over the finish line. While the numbers look dire right now, I’m hoping the experts are right and we see a massive drop off over the next month to six weeks . . . which will hopefully then start to transition the country (and the world) to a new endemic normal in which Covid-19 is just part of our lives, much like the flu is. You get your annual vaccine and call it good. While I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who willfully choose to put themselves and others at risk when the science is clear (and I’ll put my faith in the scientific consensus, thank you very much, not whatever comes out of the mouths of actors, athletes, or assorted other celebrity flat-Earthers who can’t even spell confirmation bias, let alone know what it means), I do understand the mental exhaustion. We’re all tired of this thing.
Since I don’t have much else to report, here are three recent reads I recommend:
- War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin. One of the main thrusts of Turchin’s excellent book is how the rise and fall of asabiyah, an Arabic term invented by the historian Ibn Kahldun referring to social capital or social solidarity, can lead to the rise and fall of empires. The parallels he draws to the United States, particularly to the “surplus of elites,” are striking,
- Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger. The first in the long-running Cork O’Connor series set in northern Minnesota. Fantastic.
- Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter-Godfrey-Smith. A fantastic examination of how studying the octopus (and other cephalopods), who broke off from us in the evolutionary tree over three hundred million years ago, can give us a deeper understanding of what consciousness is.
