Cormac McCarthy (2022)

A book with wonderful writing by somehow missing something.

And the writing really is superb. McCarthy can build a scene out of almost no words, even somewhere as unfamiliar as a New Orleans flophouse or a powerboat traversing the Caribbean. He can also build credible character backstories for those with even the least credible histories without it ever feeling contrived.

But… The book is premised on a mystery, the finding by divers of a plane crashed at sea that’s clearly been visited before they get there, with something of value having been removed. What was it? Why was it valuable? Why are there federal investigators chasing it? – and why do so many of the people involved wind up inexplicably dead? That’s a fascinating set-up, and so it’s deeply disapointing that it remains exactly that: a set-up, unexplained and unresolved. It’s not that there’s a lack of plot, it’s simply that it leads nowhere, and that’s a wasted opportunity for so gifted a writer.

2/5. Finished Wednesday 22 October, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Aldous Huxley (1960)

4/5. Finished Tuesday 7 October, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

William Gibson (1984)

5/5. Finished Sunday 5 October, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

George Seldes (1935)

“All of Mussolini’s monuments will be monuments to the strength of a weakling.”

A journalist’s account of Mussolini’s rise to (and exercise of) power, written by someone who both lived through parts of it and had significant contacts with the man himself. Despite being written at a time when Fascism was still being somewhat celebrated, and even admired, it’s quite a scorching read that dismantles many of its pretensions with both observations and data. It would have provided a lot of ammunition to those wanting to avoid fascist takeovers in their ovn countries to read exactly how imaginary the claims of Fascist Italy were, no matter how dramatically and repeatedly proclaimed.

Surprising for a book of its kind and date (it was first published in 1935), Hitler is conspicuous by his absence, mentioned only in passing: there are far more comparisons with Napoleon. It shows how different history looks when lived forwards.

The title is interesting: Shirer uses a similar turn of phrase to describe Mussolini in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (although he does not reference Seldes as a source). Mussolini’s will to power easily overrides any principles he may have had, which makes it hard to decide whether fascism itself had any principles or was simply the inflation of one man’s will: Mussolini seems to have been unclear about that himself, but resolving it may be key to understanding the modern trends towards authoritarian politics.

4/5. Finished Saturday 20 September, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Vernor Vinge (1981)

The lesser-known – now – precursor novel to cyberpunk.

A group of rebels engage in pranks and more serious data exfiltration using hallucinatory interfaces to computer-managed information spaces. If that sounds similar to Neuromancer then that’s because the parallels are unmistakeable. The two books appeared at roughly the same time, and initially True names seems to have been the more famous: certainly it attracted a lot of attention from some serious people in both tech and sci-fi. It’s interesting that Neuromancer emerged over the longer term as the more significant work: and I think that’s deserved, although True names remains a great read.

Both books address the issue of information overload and how it could be combatted by using broader-band neural interfaces rather than screens and keyboards. Gibson envisions a rather architectural metaphor, while Vinge goes for something more mythic and fantastical, a world whose practitioners form “covens” and interact with spells and monsters as a way to bring the available functionality into their limited view. It’s not something that’s actually emerged in what we now think of as cyberspace, which remains resolutely text-driven.

My edition of True names came with essays and an afterward by Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of AI. The essays in the main haven’t aged well, but Minsky’s critique of procedural computing still has some bite.

3/5. Finished Thursday 4 September, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)