Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - May 2024 edition

Finished it. The other chapters were on Washington and foreign policy, and on Madison’s adroit politicking both before and after the Constitutional Convention. The latter was particularly good; I learned a lot. Not Ellis’s best (that’s still his Pulitzer-winning Founding Brothers), but worth a read.

Over the weekend I zipped through Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built, an upbeat, feel-good sf novel set on a human-settled, habitable, heavily-forested moon orbiting a gas giant. It’s about a vaguely-discontented tea monk who encounters a nature-loving robot out in the woods, and the offbeat friendship that results. It’s jussssst a little bit twee, but I liked it.

Next up: Eager by Ben Goldfarb, nonfiction about beavers’ amazing comeback from the devastation of the fur trade, and exploring all that they now have to offer a climate-changing world. Remarkable critters (and cute, too, unless they’re chewing down your favorite tree).