Coming Into the Country by John McPhee

    This was not my favorite John McPheer book. I really liked The Control of Nature, Annals of the Former Earth, and Encounters with the Archdruid, but this one just didn't hit the same. I think that it could have been a lot shorter. McPhee starts with a section about rural Alaska, which was great. Then he moves on to Alaskan cities--not nearly as interesting. And then he moves on to the Alaskan wilderness, which was interesting, but is about three times as long as it needed to be. I like the early part of the book, when he is kayaking and canoeing down a river, but in the last section, he just spends all his time talking to the weirdo preppers in Eagle, Alaska. Otherwise, I don't have much to say. It's not a terrible book, but it was way below what I like from McPhee, and the part that I didn't like took up more than half the book.

On Xi Jinping by Kevin Rudd

    I had wanted to read this book for a long time, but it was a little dry and over my head. Rudd goes deep into Chinese Communist ideology, and it is incredibly well-researched, with hundreds of pages of endnotes. However, I'm not sure I needed that much. Not his fault. He even writes in the beginning a list of the chapters to skip if you're a person like me. But I thought I was different. I thought I was better than that. I was not. I could not follow all the Pekingology or really understand the importance of how many times Xi Jinping said the word "reform" in 2018 versus 2022. It was a lot to handle. Not gonna do a big post on this one.