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Empire of IvoryBook

by Naomi Novik

1 person

Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
Statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who writes the long-running blog Three-Toed Sloth and the Bactra Review of books.
liked

Mind-candy; enjoyable continuation of the series about dragons in the Napoleonic wars, in which Our Heroes venture to Africa, and the forces of European imperialism and the slave trade are righteously repelled. Of course, given the situation Novik has set up in her version of Africa, there is no way in Hell the trans-Atlantic slave trade could have begun in the first place; and no slave trade means astoundingly different European colonies in the Americas, if any at all, hence no French Revolution and no Napoleon.

His monthly "Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur" post for August 2011 — the books he read that month and feels he can recommend.

bactra.org ↗·2011-08-31

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

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