Summary of recent reading(October-December 2019)

Issola by Steven Brust:

[spoiler] The Jenoine, the alien species that created Dragaerans and who once ruled the earth, kidnap Morrolan and Aliera in order to try to get Vlad to kill Verra. This turns out to be part of a bigger plan to use the earth’s Lesser Sea of Chaos to create their own Orb. Lady Teldra gets killed in a battle between gods and Jenoine, and Spellbreaker turns into a Great Weapon where Lady Teldra lives on. [/spoiler]

Open Borders by Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith: a comic book advocating for open borders. So good it makes you wonder why there aren’t more non-fiction comic books(or graphic novels or whatever you want to call them)– I found myself thinking of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics often while reading this book.

Besides the excellent use of the medium, Caplan makes a compelling case for opening up borders and addresses many common arguments against immigration. The book even acknowledges how opening up borders completely is a radical idea and argues that it’s still worth making a case for it.

Dzur by Steven Brust: Tenth book in the series. Early in the series, you do begin to notice that all the books follow a certain pattern, but this one felt a bit anti-climactic.

I also realized that the Vlad Taltos books have comprised most of the fiction reading I’ve done this year. Which is just as well, they’re good books but I’ll try to read other things next year.