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October 2025 Book Round-up
1.Niccolò Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
One of my favorite books this year- you know it’s good when you find extra time to listen to it via audiobook: I’m not usually an audiobook person!
I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Dunnett for a long time. One of my other favorite historical fiction writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote a poem about her work that I connected when I was a teenager, and I found the fourth book in the Niccolò series in a used bookstore in England in 2023 and had been meaning to start the series ever since.
Niccolò rising follows the most unlikely of heroes, the dyers apprentice Claes, on the first stages of his meteoric rise from artisan to prominent businessman. Claes (who eventually comes to be known as Niccolò or Nicholas) is a genius who initially uses his intelligence to perform outrageous pranks in his home city of Bruges, but after a few chance encounters with two Scottish noblemen who are out for his blood, he decides to change his ways and use his mind to make his way in the world.
Dunnett really makes Bruges, Milan, and Geneva feel alive, and the research that must have went into this book is immense in scale. Certainly puts Kay, and every other historical fiction author I’ve read to shame.
Claes’s relationships are the thing that made this book excellent, although the forced tensions between the noble and not so noble parts this nature was a little grating at times. There are some annoying parts of the book: one of Nicholas’s romantic relationships is clearly wish fulfillment on the part of the author, and some of his plots are way too complicated to be believable, but these are relatively minor quibbles.
4.5/5 Stars
2.The Nature of Training: Complexity Science Applied to Endurance Performance by Manuel Sola Arjona
Read this one in Spanish (you can find my original review of it in Spanish on my Goodreads). I checked this out because I’m a fan of Manuel’s substack, and his philosophy of training in general.
The central theme of this work is that most training plans focus on the wrong things. You can train and train and train and not get results because training is a complex system (because our bodies are). A plan might be very good, but no plan survives contact with the enemy. We need to listen more to our bodies and less to statistics or other fixed metrics.
All of this makes a lot of sense. As Gordo Byrn and Alan Couzens and others have said, the specifics of a plan don’t matter much. The amount of training is important, but compared to the rest of an athlete’s life, training doesn’t take up that much time. If there’s a lot of stress in the rest of our lives, we’re not going to respond positively to any plan. Period. What’s important is reducing the amount of stress in our lives and increasing the amount of daily exercise we do.
However, there are three major problems with this book. The first is that half of it isn’t about training but about complexity science as a whole. I didn’t buy this to read a recap of Taleb with examples about the environment and global warming, as true as they may be. I get that there needed to be an introduction of this stuff for new readers, but it went too deep.
Second, I think Arjona has too rosy a view of our sensations as guides. For an experienced athlete, I completely agree; RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion) or perceived effort is the most reliable indicator of what we should do. But for inexperienced athletes, external markers, like heart rate, can be very helpful in learning what is too much and what isn’t. Heart rate training helped me between my senior year of highschool and first year of college for example, realize that I had been doing most of my easy days in the tempo zone.
Third, and what bothered me the most, is the focus on our evolutionary environment as a guideline for modern training. I have two problems with this. First, the goals of evolution and the goals of a professional athlete are very different. There’s not much point in using the former as a guide for the latter. Second, evolution (and this is something I see VERY commonly) doesn’t mean optimization. It means just enough to survive. Our diets and lifestyles weren’t optimized in the Stone Age. It’s possible to improve them (and also obviously make them worse), but we shouldn’t think of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as something to emulate directly. That lifestyle can provide us with hints as to what might be the right direction to take, but direct emulation reads much more like a just-so story, and much less of a practice that is strongly supported by science.
3/5 Stars
3. Harry Potter e il Calice di Fuoco by J.K. Rowling
I’m starting to work on my Italian again, and Harry Potter is my favorite series to work with when doing so. I got through the first three books in Italian last year, but put my work with the language on pause until I could pass my B2 Spanish test.
Harry Potter is a great series for me for language learning. I’m a firm believer in Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis: that is we learn language by understanding comprehensible messages. Since I know Harry Potter so well; up to a point in some situations where I can quote passages of dialogue verbatim with some prompting, it is much easier to understand its text in another language than it would be for another book. This effectively allows me to start reading much earlier than I would be able to otherwise, because if I can read the character names and understand some basic words, I can still follow the plot. even with only a sometimes ~20% understanding of the rest of the vocabulary.
The Italians, unlike the Spanish translators, changed around some of the names of the characters. Albus Dumbledore became Albus Silenti, Slytherin became Serpeverde and Professor Snape became Professor Piton. Apparently in earlier editions, there were even more character names changes, most of which are documented in the appendix. I liked this in general: it gave the books a little bit of a different flavor than reading them in English.
Goblet of Fire is the point in the series where the world of Harry Potter really starts to open up: we see other wizarding schools at the Triwizard tournament, learn much more about the wizard government, and Harry begins to deal with some pretty adult situations. Of course there are some problems with the book: the central plot is pretty unbelievable in hindsight and makes Voldemort look like an idiot, the foreign students are walking stereotypes of France and Eastern Europe, and the house-elf subplot never made anyone look good. However, that being said, this is still one of my very favorite books of all time, and I enjoyed being able to read it in Italian.
lolwut
Yea dude it's pretty interesting. Spanish translation did not do this at all, but apparently it's quite common in most of the other translations, especially in non-romance or Germanic languages.
The French version renames a lot of stuff too. Hogwarts -> Poudlard, Snape -> Rogue, Tom Riddle -> Tom Elvis Jedusor, Slytherin -> Serpentard, Muggle -> Moldu, etc.
IIRC Tom Riddle's name had to change in translations to maintain the plot-relevant anagram involving his name.
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