2022, book 7: The furthest goal: Engelbert Kaempfer's encounter with Tokugawa Japan, edited by Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey & Derek Massarella

Uneven collection of papers given at a 1990 symposium on Kaempfer and his trip to Japan.

Most interesting bits: the chapter on Imamura Genemon Eisei, the mentions of the Republic of Letters, comparisons of Kaempfer's sketches with the published etchings, and this amusing complaint from Hokusai (pp 136):

I suggest that the engraver should add no lower eyelids where I did not draw them. As to the noses: these are my noses [he drew two examples] and the noses usually engraved are the noses of Toyokuni, which I do not like at all and which are contrary to the laws of the art of drawing. It is also the fashion to draw the eyes like this [a black point in the centre], but such eyes I like no more than the noses

2022, book 6: The relativity explosion, Martin Gardner

Very light pop-sci account of special & general relativity.

2022, books R1–R8: lots of Robert van Gulik

I'll start counting books I re-read, because I re-read quite a few this year. On a visit to Holland, I worked my way through:

• R1: Moord op het Maanfeest, Robert van Gulik
• R2: Het spook in de tempel, Robert van Gulik
• R3: Het rode paviljoen, Robert van Gulik
• R4: Labyrinth in Lan-fang, Robert van Gulik
• R5: Meer van Mien-yuan, Robert van Gulik
• R6: Halssnoer en kalebas, Robert van Gulik
• R7: Het wilgenpatroon, Robert van Gulik
• R8: Nagels in Ning-tsjo, Robert van Gulik

2022, book 5: Drieduizend jaar navigatie op de sterren: Mythevorming en geschiedenis, Siebren van der Werf

Lovely, if somewhat light on the science and engineering.

2022, book 4: My life as a spy, Katherine Verdery

American anthropologist goes to communist Romania in the 1970s and 1980s, blunders her way through her research, and writes a memoir bizarrely sympathetic to the Securitate.

You can almost forgive Verdery for being naive on her first trips. She was a young postdoc and had, apparently, been too busy to read anything about the world outside the US. Her later trips, however, paint her as someone who still doesn't get it. She spent years studying the habits of Romanians, but has not managed to actually understand her subjects, colleagues, and friends. She manages to offend many of them, and I predict this book isn't going to help.

She's not 100% blind to the problems of informants, since she takes it very personally that her friends and hosts reported on her activities to the Securitate, speaking of "betrayal" and the "pain" she experienced because she "thought they loved" her. Verdery appears to have been (and shockingly perhaps still is) unaware that any Romanian citizen who had contact with a foreigner (let alone an American) was required to file a report, whether they wanted to or not. She then proceeds to paint the Securitate officers as just your average OK guys like you and me, because apparently the torture and terror are just fine as long as she's not the one experiencing them directly. So her friends are backstabbers. But the Securitate were just patriots doing their job. Sure, Katherine.

The best parts of the book are her account of "sneaking into" a parade (surprised people tell her that everyone tries to get out of having to march in these things, and she must be crazy for joining one voluntarily) and some Romanian jokes she recounts ("What did we use to light our homes before gas lamps? Electricity.").