The Coronation by Boris Akunin (2000)

This seventh book in the Fandorin series combines historical immersion, a compelling mystery, and thriller pacing against the backdrop of Tsar Nicholas II’s 1896 coronation and the Khodynka Tragedy, where 1,400 people died in a stampede. Akunin’s increasingly powerful and resourceful adversaries are an effective escalation across the series. Hidden treachery, unexpected allies, and a motley cast of characters sustain the suspense. The first-person account of a royal majordomo was not to my taste, and reminds me why I did not enjoy Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The technique does help with historical immersion, however.

During the imperial coronation festivities, Fandorin confronts a dangerous conspiracy involving powerful adversaries, hidden loyalties, and threats to the royal household. The plot twists, &  turns in many, unexpected ways as the mystery unfolds.

Despite my reservations about the narrator, I find the mystery, characterization, and historical setting outstanding. Akunin makes the imperial world feel inhabited rather than merely reconstructed, while the escalating contest between Fandorin and his formidable opponents gives the plot the momentum of a genuine thriller. The narrative perspective occasionally impedes my enjoyment, but the novel’s other strengths more than compensate.

4/5 Stars

Chasing Happiness

 

“Don’t pursue happiness in the way today’s culture advises. Pursue virtue, generosity, piety, integrity, and kindness. Your happiness will come from the love you give.”

Arthur Brooks closes with this advice in his essay on happiness. It echoes an argument Aristotle made more than 2,300 years ago.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapters 4–5, Aristotle distinguishes eudaimonia—human flourishing through virtuous activity from lesser goods people mistake for happiness: pleasure (hēdonē), honor and esteem (timē), and wealth. Pleasure fades; honor depends on others; wealth is a means, not an end.

For Aristotle, happiness is not merely a feeling to acquire. It is a way of living: exercising our capacities well and acting virtuously over a complete life.

Charity Majors revisits this distinction in “If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?”. Her argument challenges the idea that management succeeds by keeping everyone happy. Psychological safety matters because it enables learning and high performance, not because nobody should feel uncomfortable. Growth requires accountability, difficult feedback, and the willingness to confront problems.

The parallel is instructive. A pleasant workplace is not necessarily a flourishing one, just as momentary pleasure is not a flourishing life. The goal is not to eliminate discomfort, but to build an environment where people can do meaningful work, develop their abilities, and achieve something worthwhile together.

(AI reconstruction of Aristotle)

Aristotle gives us the framework; Brooks gives us the reminder. Pursue the good, not merely the feeling.

“Don’t pursue happiness in the way today’s culture advises. Pursue virtue, generosity, piety, integrity, and kindness. Your happiness will come from the love you give.”

Further reading: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I · Arthur Brooks, on happiness · Charity Majors, on happy teams

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985)

This book is a sprawling, gruesome, and stirring novel that defined most tropes of the Old West drama, a genre that has outlived by many generations the historical period it portrays. McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning prose immerses the reader in frontier squalor, relentless violence, disease, hardships, and the harsh demands of survival, while exploring unrequited love and the frontier spirit in a depressing story. The main characters are complex, compelling, and realistically human; their psychological contradictions and tangled relationships give the novel its enduring power.

Two aging Texas Rangers lead a cattle drive north from Texas to Montana, encountering danger, hardship, and the varied inhabitants of the frontier in a depressing story.

The journey supplies the structure, but the novel’s real achievement is the people: their longings, loyalties, disappointments, and stubborn persistence in lives that offer no comfort or certainty. The characters transcend the Western archetypes they embody, lending emotional heft to a world where violence is commonplace and happiness remains elusive. The length and brutality can make the book demanding but McMurtry’s command of character and human psychology makes the experience worthwhile.

4/5 Stars

Has France lost its charm, its cars, and now its schools?

During my misspent youth I had a full-blown Francophile stage. I watched French films, read French newspapers, followed French politics, and tracked every development of the May 1968 student uprising. At the time, it genuinely felt like it might turn into another French Revolution.

Then I read Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. Her long section on the American (and earlier French) disaster in Indochina/Vietnam cured me of the romance. The French had already demonstrated the same combination of arrogance, denial, and eventual collapse that the Americans later repeated. Interest evaporated.

In 2022 I picked up Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace (the classic account of the Algerian War of 1954–1962). That book filled in the missing piece. Suddenly the post-colonial migration from North Africa into France, and the broader pattern of Muslim demographic and cultural pressure on Europe, made a lot more sense. One of the clearest lessons from that war is the sheer effectiveness of a death-cult’s intransigence: refuse every compromise, raise the body count, outlast the democratic will, and the other side eventually folds.

Because we are all bombarded by news, France is impossible to ignore. The “disaffected youth” (mostly of Algerian and other North African origin) were already torching cars sporadically in the banlieues in the 1980s. The real annual “Carbeque” tradition, hundreds to thousands of cars set alight every New Year’s Eve and Bastille Day solidified in the 1990s and 2000s and has never stopped. The numbers fluctuate, but the ritual is now well-entrenchenched and decades old. The 2023 riots simply scaled it up: several thousand vehicles burned in a single week of mayhem.

And the newest generation of “disaffected youth” has updated the repertoire. They have started burning down their own schools. The French protest tradition evolves, but the underlying energy remains the same. Examples here, here, here or here.

Prodigal Son by Gregg Hurwitz (2021)

I continue to enjoy the Orphan X series for its combination of kinetic prose, close-quarters combat, relentless suspense, melodrama, and super-spy-versus-super-villain entertainment, but by book six, Hurwitz is pushing the underlying mythology toward implausibility. Evan's sudden discovery of a globe-trotting, immensely powerful mother, the newly revealed blood relationships, and the autonomous-AI plotline collectively stretch my willingness to suspend disbelief. Hurwitz is not a science-fiction writer, and I preferred the earlier approach of keeping his characters' extraordinary hacking abilities in the background rather than introducing an AI antagonist whose capabilities require increasingly conspicuous technological hand-waving. Still, the thriller mechanics remain tight, and the teenager and pre-teen drama works surprisingly well when Hurwitz restrains the melodrama. By now, I am invested in Evan and the network of people surrounding him, which makes every new mystery and improbable coincidence entertaining to unravel.

Plot: Evan becomes entangled in revelations about his family while confronting a new threat that combines personal history, international intrigue, and artificial intelligence. The investigation pulls him and his allies through escalating dangers as they attempt to determine whom they can trust.

I enjoyed Prodigal Son despite the increasingly elaborate mythology and the moments when the story made me think, "That is too ridiculous." Hurwitz remains skilled at constructing tightly sequenced action and keeping the narrative moving, while Evan's relationships provide enough emotional grounding to offset the increasingly extravagant threats. I found the book less convincing than earlier installments, but still sufficiently entertaining to make the series' continuing mysteries worth pursuing.

3/5 Stars

A drop of corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (2025)

This second Ana and Din fantasy detective novel is a 2026 Hugo Award nominee and improves on its predecessor. I particularly enjoyed the uncomfortable collaboration between our talented, neurodivergent protagonists and the bureaucratic machinery of their society. Against them stands a supervillain with superpowers.  The antagonist's patience, intelligence, and meticulous preparation gives our plucky heroes what seems like an insurmountable task. Bennett also uses the case to explore institutional power, social hierarchy, and the ways bureaucracies can either preserve or endanger a society.

I remain frustrated, however, by the magic system. The biological systems underlying its fantasy world violate physics. I am equally bothered that generations of supposedly brilliant natural philosophers have apparently discovered none of the basic insights that transformed our own understanding of biology and the physical world, leaving the society trapped in pre-Enlightenment ignorance, suffering, and squalor. Still, Bennett’s characters, dialogue, plotting, and prose are so compelling that I am willing to suspend disbelief. I particularly enjoyed the social dynamics and the tension between individual intelligence and institutional capability.

Ana and Din investigate a seemingly inexplicable biological threat, gradually uncovering an elaborate scheme whose scope and consequences extend far beyond the initial mystery. Their investigation brings them into conflict with an adversary whose preparation and intelligence repeatedly outmaneuver their expectations.

Bennett compensates with compelling characters, intelligent dialogue, inventive plotting, and writing that makes the world’s social and political tensions wonderful literature.

4/5 Stars

Memoirs of a thinking radish by Peter Medawar (1986)

Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960, but I know him almost as much for his popular science essays, where wit, intellectual clarity, and unfiltered criticism make even difficult subjects entertaining. Memoirs of a Thinking Radish collects his recollections of childhood and youth, his studies at Oxford, and the research career that eventually brought him international recognition. I particularly enjoyed the contrast between the magnitude of his scientific accomplishments and the deliberately ridiculous title, which reflects the humility running throughout the book.

Medawar gives considerable credit to the collaborators, mentors, colleagues, technicians, and other members of the support network who contributed to his success. His willingness to puncture his own reputation keeps the autobiography from becoming an exercise in self-congratulation, while his sharp observations provide much of its entertainment. I found his account especially interesting because it reveals the human infrastructure behind scientific achievement rather than presenting discovery as the product of solitary genius.

I did not find Memoirs of a Thinking Radish quite as entertaining as Richard Feynman's autobiographical books, whose exuberance and eccentricity make them difficult to match. Nevertheless, I found Medawar's combination of scientific accomplishment, humility, humor, and candid criticism thoroughly enjoyable.

4/5 Stars

Buy a Bullet by Gregg Hurwitz (2016)

I have always been interested in the possibility that a series novella or short story began as a writer's private character exercise: a vignette written to discover how a character's past shaped the motivations, reactions, and inner dialogue required by a larger work. During my own amateur writing years, from 1979 to 1986, my small writers' mutual-support group occasionally assigned such exercises for our longer projects. Successful writers sometimes discover that one of those discarded pieces can stand on its own, whether as a prequel, a deleted scene, or simply an opportunity to monetize material already written. I cannot tell whether Buy a Bullet originated that way, although its function within the Orphan X series makes the possibility intriguing.

The story is a prequel to Evan Smoak's transformation into the "Nowhere Man," the protector of people who have nowhere else to turn. The story supplies the decisive experience that moves Evan toward the moral purpose he embraces in The Nowhere Man, showing the psychological hinge between the government-trained assassin and the self-appointed protector. The premise interests me more than the execution: the story is too short to develop much tension, and Hurwitz pushes the emotional turning point toward melodrama. Even so, I enjoyed seeing the particular experience that helps explain why Evan eventually chooses to spend his considerable skills helping strangers rather than simply disappearing into a private life.

The story is more useful as an Orphan X character history than compelling as an independent thriller. It fills an important gap in Evan's trajectory, but the compressed format leaves little room for the suspense, tactical ingenuity, and character interplay that make the novels entertaining.

4/5 Stars

The State Counselor by Boris Akunin (2017)

In this sixth Fandorin mystery, we experience the collision of Fandorin’s humanistic, enlightened ethics with the labyrinthine bureaucracy and Czarist power politics of 1891 Moscow. Fandorin is now a State Counselor, placing him inside the very apparatus whose corruption and institutional self-interest test his commitment to justice. I continue to value the series most for its vivid historically accurate slice-of-life: Akunin makes Muscovite society, political factions, manners, and official machinery come alive. The revolutionary Nihilists again provide the adversarial force, led by an autistic mastermind with fun eccentricities and powers. I found the thriller mechanics enjoyable, although the Christie-like reversals sometimes become melodramatic and over-done. The passionate, sexually liberated women are less convincing as characters; their opacity serves the mystery but leaves them underdeveloped. Fandorin himself is also less dominant than in earlier installments, with his deductions and actions constrained by his position.

A political assassination draws Fandorin into a conflict among revolutionary conspirators, government officials, and competing factions within Moscow’s ruling apparatus. He must investigate while navigating institutional rivalries, concealed loyalties, and a conspiracy whose real architect is hidden.

I enjoyed The State Counselor as much for its historical atmosphere as for its mystery. Fandorin’s diminished freedom is an interesting evolution of the character, even if it reduces some of the earlier books’ intellectual fireworks. The plot twists are entertaining  despite their excesses, while the depiction of 1891 Moscow is, again, the best part of the series. The original Russian novel was so popular in 1999 that it became the most-expensive film in Russian history in 2005, for which Akunin wrote the screenplay.

4/5 Stars

Second-mover advantage in the age of AI

The internet bubble of 1995–2001 produced a classic mismatch between investor returns and eventual economic impact. Early backers of Amazon watched the stock collapse and then languish; the net present value of those investments looked terrible for decades. Eventually, the company’s extraordinary effects on retail, cloud computing, and logistics become fully visible. Capital destroyed on the way up created the conditions for patient capital to buy undervalued assets on the way down. The second movers won.

Eerily similar events are unfolding in AI. Trillions of dollars are flooding frontier model companies and the surrounding ecosystem. Hype cycles are reliable: AI will reach the plateau of productivity only after the bubble deflates and the trough of disappointment has been crossed. When those events occur, valuations will reset. Clever investors will again find underpriced assets whose economic viability is clearer than their current market prices suggest.

The geography of those assets will matter. SemiAnalysis’s recent mapping of Chinese AI infrastructure shows a market already larger than EMEA and the rest of Asia combined, with more than 24 GW of capacity across a thousand facilities, with ByteDance alone occupying roughly a fifth of delivered space. Build-out is rapid: 100 MW facilities routinely appear in under twelve months. Policy (“Eastern Data, Western Compute”), state carriers, and hyperscalers are driving wholesale AI demand while legacy retail racks sit underutilized. Chip constraints and high vacancy rates exist, yet the physical capacity keeps expanding.

Dan Wang’s Breakneck supplies the cultural contrast. China is an engineering state whose elite, trained in civil and chemical engineering, prefers to build first and manage consequences later. The United States has become a lawyerly society whose elite, steeped in process and compliance, excels at obstruction. The difference shows up in high-speed rail timelines, power permitting, and the speed of modular data center construction. After the AI bubble pops, government influence will shape which second movers capture durable economic value. In China, engineering-oriented leadership is already directing capital toward infrastructure that can be filled once model economics stabilize. In the United States, the same leadership style that slows housing and transmission lines may also slow the reallocation of capital toward the firms that survive the trough.

The frontier labs may still produce the most advanced models. The second-mover advantage, however, is likely to accrue to those who own the undervalued capacity, the power contracts, and the policy alignment that turn models into sustained economic activity. History suggests the largest returns will go not to those who paid peak prices for the most hyped names, but to those who bought the right assets after the bubble popped.