potentialities

What I've been reading

I read Hamilton: The Revolution and pretty much the only way I could have enjoyed it more would be if it had even more annotations, because they're all exactly the sort of thing I like to read. Or alternately it could have had more pictures of cast members in their underwear. Either way.

It's Yuletide Eve, otherwise known as Christmas Eve Eve. (Christmas Eve Eve is totally a thing when all your significant holiday observances take place on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day is just lazing around eating leftovers and playing with your new stuff.)

That means most of the rest of the year I'll be reading Yuletide fic instead of real books. (I realize that "real books" is often a charitable assessment of my choices of reading material.)

What I've been reading

I read War of Two: The Dark Mystery of the Duel Between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, and Its Legacy for America, which I snagged from the display of ARCs that they have for the taking at my library. The author, John Sedgwick, originally got interested in the subject because he is descended from the guy that Hamilton wrote an unrelated letter to the night before the duel and then really lucked out on when the book ended up being published. It's wittily written and I really like how well it fleshed out Burr, generally and in relation to Hamilton.

I read The Affinities, which I enjoyed. Robert Charles Wilson's writing has this very readable quality to me and the premise is fun.

I read Penric's Demon, the novella that Lois McMaster Bujold wrote recently set in the Five Gods universe. It was lightweight and fun. Actually, if it weren't set in a shared universe with adult novels it feels pretty close to being a kid's book to me. Some pretty mild sauciness would have to be pruned, but other than that…

I read The Babe Didn't Point: And Other Stories about Iowans and Sports by Bill Bryson, Sr., because when I was reading Bill Bryson, Jr.'s latest book (the one that I didn't particularly take to) I distinctly recalled him mentioning in his other books that his father was a sportswriter. This selection of his writing is heavy on Iowegians, which is not a specialization that interests me as much as it does the Iowa State University Press that published it, for obvious reasons, but it was still very entertaining reading. The funny thing is he writes exactly like I would imagine based on the familial connection, aside from the generation gap and choice of subeject matter.

What I'm reading now

I'm about halfway through the Chernow Hamilton biography.