Month: January 2025

I read this book on the history Venice based on the recommendation of Venkatesh Rao, a writer I like. It tracks the history of Venice from its very beginnings to the height of its imperial trade network to its eventual downfall and marginalization. This has a lot of what I look for in a history book: excellent detail from primary sources, an authorial voice and point of view, and larger historical context.

One the fascinating things about this book is the way in which their full-throated capitalistic enterprise required an intense police state and an embrace of community collective action. Their trade empire worked because they could rely on the accuracy of their bookkeeping to keep track of things coming in and things going out. Their system faltered when the collective and private civic virtue. Well, that and the Portuguese finding an alternate way to get spices from India.

Worth a read, I’d say!

Red Rabbit never went where I expected it to go, delightfully so. It’s a spooky, supernatural Western with witches, ghosts, cannibals, demons, and lazy sheriffs (well, just one). There’s a lot of gore and violence in this one, so it may not be for everyone, but there’s a core of kindly compassion in it that I found appealing. Also, that cover is pretty great!

I was immediately struck by the cover with its picture of the burning tower. I think I would’ve read it just on the cover alone. There’s something stark and unsettling about it, apart from the obvious ruin and destruction.

Hav is actually two books: The Last Letters from Hav (1985) and Hav of the Myrmidons (2005). It’s a travelogue of a fictional country that was so compelling when it was published that people wrote the author asking her how to get there. It reminds me very much of one of my favorite books, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about her travels in the Balkans between the two World Wars. Hav is filled with people washed up from other places, settled into a kind of aimless mishmash of languages and cultures. The sequel paints a picture of a world that I think we all might recognize in how much has changed in what we’ve lost and gained.

It’s a slow, quiet, meditative book and I was happy to have found it.

Shades of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, in that they both explore the ways in which wealth and power use explorations of the occult to subdue and exploit those who aren’t. Whereas Eco’s book is steeped in academia, Enriquez’s book dwells more in the mundane, the domestic, the day-to-day. This makes the intrusions of horror more, well, horrific. Not a pleasant book, by any means, but one written thoughtfully and with great care. One of the rare books that captures the complicated relationships between children and adults in a way that feels real and true. If you’re up for a long unhappy book filled with some pretty unpleasant stuff that manages to thought-provoking and profound, this is the book for you. I’d also recommend her books of short stories, The Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed.