Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is books that surprised us. First up. a tease from Jim Butcher’s Storm Front.

I had several enchanted items around—or half-enchanted items, anyway. Carrying out a full enchantment is expensive and time-consuming, and I just couldn’t afford to do it very much. We blue-collar wizards just have to sling a few spells out where we can and hope they don’t go stale at the wrong time.

Storm Front

“Our bodies are programmed to consumne fat and sugars because they’re rare in nature. In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, and sexual, and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesiety. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.” – Danah Boyd, 2009 speech.

Quoted in The Filter Bubble

(1) The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. I knew going in that this was a novel written for overtly political reasons, so I figured it would on the poorer side. To my surprise, Jurgis was a commandingly sympathetic character, and the novel didn’t disintegrate until the last third of the book where he essentially disappears, supplanted by political speeches.

(2) The Four Winds, Kristin Hannah. I had some notion of Hannah as a romance author, so I was expecting to find this mildly interesting for the setting and then skim past the Fifty Shades stuff. To my surprise, history and character drama take center stage here, and the character drama has almost nothing to do with romance.

(3) & (4) Rachel’s Holiday and The Sleeping Beauty. These were both lent to me by my then-lady friend shortly before I had my transplant. The latter was a fantasy novel set in a realm where literary tropes — The Tradition — actively shape the lives of people, who if they meet certain attributes will recreate stories from legend. Surprisingly fun. Rachel’s Holiday was more serious, and involved a narrator who was in denial about her substance abuse problem. It proved to be one of 2022’s more memorable reads.

(5) The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben. I expected this to be interesting: I didn’t expect it to be one of my favorite science books ever.

(6) The Second Sleep, Robert Harris. Not having read anything about this, I began it absolutely believing it was set in medieval England. It proved instead to be set in the far future, where civilization has collapsed and has rebuilt to a psuedo-medieval level.

(7) Into the Black. What I expected: a history of the space shuttle’s creation. What I was surprised by: the Air Force actively expected to create its own space programmed centered around a Manned Observation Laboratory, and recruited its own version of the Mercury 7 — the “Magnificent Eight” — which would have included the first black astronaut had he not died in ’67.

(8) Ain’t My America, Bill Kauffman. Coming of age in the neocon ascendancy, I took for granted that one party was more married to aggressive foreign intervention than the other, but I was quickly disabused of that notion, both by the supposedly peaceful party’s continuing interventions after 2008, and by discovering Bill’s book here, which demonstrated that the other party was the most anti-intervention voice prior to its takeover by the military-industrial complex, something Murray Rothbard documented in another book.

(9) The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance, Russ Roberts. An economist and a English teacher form an unlikely attachment, but their interest in one another is tested by their differing political views I’d just started listening to Roberts’ “EconTalk” podcast as part of a project to get the perspectives of various professionals (lawyers, doctors, and economists) on issues of the day, and gotten interest in reading Roberts as a result. Although at the time I was opposed to Roberts’ economic views on moral grounds, listening to him and reading this book made me realize we were on the same page in regards to desiring human flourishing. Indeed, Roberts’ podcast these days is more about the meaningful life than economic analysis.

(10) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. A single sentence in this book caused a political paradigm shift for me. It’s one of those “This book is so impactful I can’t review it properly” books.