📚 Finished reading: "Inventing the Renaissance" by Ada Palmer

Inventing the Renaissance was my “big book” of the year, ⊕ [Note: Some other Big Books I enjoyed: “The Power Broker” (2015, before I was regularly writing about them), The Three Body Problem series (2017), The Dawn of Everything (2021, closest to “Inventing the Renaissance” in message and style), Goedel, Escher, Bach (2022), and Ada Palmer’s own Terra Ignota series (2024-25). ] and I could not have picked a worse time to start it: changing jobs, moving accross country, an infant at home. It is a testatemnt to how good it was that I finished it. More than that: I am eager to read it again. Re-reading is necessary to make more sense of the whirlwind of names, dates and events that are just too darn similar, even with Palmer’s attempts to give them cute and memorable nicknames. I know there was a Battle Pope, and a Battle Pope 2, and a very very very (…) bad Pope, but would I be able to tell you their actual names and origin stories? Fortunately, the thickest, middle part of the book — a…