Pasted

I try to do a book review at the end of every year. Last year, I never got around to it, and the year between then and now has been slow for reading, so let's do a combined review. It is a chance for me to refresh the books in my memory and, maybe, give someone an idea for what to read.
 About half the books I read were fiction and half — non. If I were to pick the most interesting one, I would choose the "Forgotten Ally" — a history of China spanning the period from the 1911 Wuhan Rebellion and through the second World War.
 It puts the enormous historical event of WW2 into a new perspective. I have been taught the Russian view of it and the "Western" view. But they are both self-centered. When you take the wider perspective, you see that the war did not start in 1939. The invasion of Poland launched in September of 1939 by Germany and the USSR was when a war that has already been raging in Asia spilled into Europe — when it became a "World War".
 This is not the only remarkable thing about this book. It talks about the way Japan considered China to be within its sphere of influence; how it grew uneasy about China's dealings with the West; about how it stoked separatism in Manchuria in order to weaken China, invaded, and installed a puppet government in 1932; how Japan sensed weakness caused by political infighting and launched a full invasion in 1937; how it hoped to overrun Chinese defences in days and got mired for months that turned into years… I was reading it while seeing it replay in real time with different countries.
 Cheery.
 Another fascinating read was "The Man Who Broke Capitalism". A single person — Jack Welch — had a sweeping and lasting impact on how businesses are run in the US. For a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders but forfeited their futures. It explains how Boeing went from an engineering powerhouse to stumbling from one failure to another (737 Max, SLS, Starliner…), how Intel lost its lead in chip manufacturing, and much, much more.
 The last book I want to mention is "Fire Weather". This book tells the story of the devastating 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta's oil sands capital. It makes for a gripping story, but it builds on it to talk about the ongoing climate emergency. It speaks to the climate-sceptic Albertan who might be willing to be convinced. It discusses the history of climate prediction and the manufactured controversy around it in a way that makes sense and is bolstered with facts. To go with it, then, "The Ministry for the Future" and "Termination Shock" are two good cli-fi novels speculating about getting out of the crisis.
  The whole list, in the order of starting:
 1. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā - Nāgārjuna
2. The Inverted World - Christopher Priest
3. The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber, David Wengrow
4. The Ministry for the Future - Kim Stanley Robinson
5. Forgotten Ally - Rana Mitter
6. Never Enough - Judith Grisel
7. The Hidden Spring - Mark Solms
8. Alicia en el País de las Maravillas - Lewis Carroll
9. The New Breed - Kate Darling
10. The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
11. Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
12. Thinking Fast And Slow - Daniel Kahneman
13. Бессильные Мира Сего - Борис и Аркадий Стругацкие
14. The Man Who Broke Capitalism - David Gelles
15. The Girl With All The Gifts - M. R. Carey
16. Viral BS - Seema Yasmin
17. Flow - Mihaly Csilkzhentmihalyi
18. The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa
19. Bounce - Matthew Syed
20. Expecting Better - Emily Oster
21. Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn: The Complete Guide - Penny Simkin
22. Red Team Blues - Cory Doctorow
23. Never Finished - David Goggins
24. The Peripheral - William Gibson
25. Anaximander - Carlo Rovelli
26. Agency - William Gibson
27. No-Regret Decisions - Shannon Lee Simmons
28. Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
29. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
30. Termination Shock - Neal Stephenson
31. Breach - Eliot Peper
32. Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
33. Children of Memory - Adrian Tchaikovsky
34. Fire Weather - John Valliant