2024

All Systems Red is the first novella in the Murderbot Diaries, the journal of a part-organic, part-robot SecUnit charged with protecting a team of researchers surveying an unknown planet even though it would much rather be watching soap operas. This was really entertaining and mixed some funny story with real questions of the personhood of this construct. I think the audio format was great for this and the narrator, Kevin R. Free, gave an excellent performance. I’ll probably aim for the audio versions of the rest of the series depending on what I can get from the library.

Artificial Condition picks up right after the events of All Systems Red, with the SecUnit searching for answers about its past. We get to meet a new bot character ART, who I loved, and the other new characters are interesting too. I think this does a good job of having a self-contained story while still advancing the progress of the series. I enjoyed the first book slightly more, but I’m excited to get to the rest of the series.

The author is a Potawatomi woman and ecologist. In Braiding Sweetgrass she gives us a collection of essays that are equal parts history, ecology, and personal stories. She presents a worldview that combines Indigenous teaching on the relationship between humanity and the rest of the natural world with Western scientific thought. This book teaches the importance of reciprocity with nature and gratitude for the many gifts our world gives us. Her writing is beautiful and thought provoking and I would recommend this book to everyone. As an aside, the physical book was printed on recycled paper and it feels really nice in my hands.

Changer is the first book in Matt Gemmell’s KESTREL series, a series of thrillers centered on a European special forces unit. They are tasked with investigating a secret research project that has gone awry and save Europe from near-certain destruction. The book is exciting throughout and I really enjoyed the main conflict and sci-fi elements. I enjoyed it enough that I’m probably going to read the other two in the series immediately.

A man’s world is turned upside down when he finds evidence his brother, who disappeared after being accused of murder over a decade ago, may still be alive and his girlfriend disappears at the same time. Like most of Harlan Coben’s books, this a complicated mystery with multiple twists. It picks up quickly and is intriguing and intense the whole way through, which I enjoyed. This was especially interesting because I’m pretty sure I’ve read this before but I didn’t remember any of the details, so the entire time what I was reading felt familiar but I still didn’t know what was coming next.

John Cleaver is obsessed with serial killers and follows a strict set of rules to prevent himself from turning into one. Following his rules becomes impossible after a series of murders in his town. I don’t think I’ve read any horror before this, but I wanted to read some of Wells’ work after listening to him on Writing Excuses and Intentionally Blank. I thought the premise of this book was fascinating and it followed through well.

In my opinion, JINX is the weakest of the three books in the KESTREL series. To explain, I’m going to include spoilers. This is partly an issue with my own interest, because I couldn’t get into the premise of a classified Artificial General Intelligence escaped from the lab and started killing people. I enjoyed the discussion of privacy and the dangers of automated systems, but I don’t enjoy the AGI angle. The story was interesting enough and it was good to get more of the characters’ stories, although Aldridge was getting on my nerves a bit. I still enjoyed it for the most part, but found the ending unsatisfying.

Paved Paradise starts with a simple premise: every car trip starts and ends in a parking space. From there, the author discusses the history of automobile-driven design and how finding places to put all of those cars has driven the last century of design in the US. This book is fantastic and really highlights how utterly unhinged it is that there are so many parking spaces for every car in the US and most of them sit empty. It highlights the social and political forces that drive the parking-based design and steps people are taking to take back cities from cars. I’d highly recommend this book.

The third book of the Murderbot Diaries is excellent as usual. Murderbot goes to an abandoned terraforming facility for some intelligence gathering against GrayCris and is entangled with a group of humans studying the facility. I didn’t get as attached to the other human characters in this one the way I did in the first two, but the new bot character is excellent.

A former journalist finds out his rich uncle has passed away and left him the businesses, both legitimate and not. He’s thrown into the deep end of villainy and has to figure out how to survive. This book is hilarious and a quick read. I’d definitely recommend it.

The Calculating Stars is an alternate history of human spaceflight. A meteorite strikes just off the US east coast, destroying most of the eastern states, setting off irreversible climate change and a push to outer space. Elma York, a WASP during the war, works as a computer for the International Aerospace Coalition, fights for women to be included in the astronaut corps. I thought this book was excellent. The premise was interesting and well thought out, and it highlighted the race and gender issues well. I’ll definitely pick up the rest of the series.

The Golden Spoon is billed as a murder mystery in a fictionalized Great British Bake Off and it started off promising. I enjoyed the characters and the beginning of the story, but I think the pacing wasn’t great. In the end, the B plot held my interest more than the main murder. I’m not disappointed that I read it, but I wouldn’t recommend it either.

I borrowed this from the library because the Netflix show was popular and I heard the book was way better than the American adaptation. The Three Body Problem starts during the Cultural Revolution and bounces between then and present day, following a secret military base and an apparent attack on scientists. The only answers can be found in a video game Three Body about the growth and destruction of civilizations in a hostile world. Overall I enjoyed the book. I think the premise was really interesting and the scenes set in the Cultural Revolution were excellent. Some of the science was a little eyebrow raising at times and sometimes the pacing was pretty slow, with long infodumps. Parts of the book read like a history book, which I suspect is intentional. Some of the dialogue seemed very awkward, but I assume that’s an artifact of translation (the translator’s note mentions trying to capture Chinese speech patterns in English). Most of what I’ve read was originally published in English so I don’t have much experience with translations. I enjoyed it and will probably read the rest of the trilogy at some point.

This Is How You Lose The Time War is an epistolary novellla following two agents on opposite sides of a war through time to shape the outcome of the universe. I picked it up because the Writing Excuses podcast is doing a close reading of it. The beginning is somewhat confusing because much of the world is not explained directly, but the story quickly becomes engrossing. The writing is beautiful, if a little flowery at times. I normally listen to audiobooks while I’m cleaning and I discovered with this book I can’t do that when the writing is more complex and I need to pay closer attention. I loved this and will probably read the text version at some point.

In the second KESTREL book the team faces another world-altering challenge. This book focuses on the seemingly inevitable horrors of climate change and radical attempts to address it, which was a good setting for an action story. It was fun to see more of the characters from the first book and get development in their stories. The villain was a great character because he isn’t just moustache-twirling evil, he has understandable motivations and the consequences of his actions weigh on him. I’m looking forward to book three.

Words of Radiance is an excellent continuation of the Stormlight Archive. It doesn’t have the slow start Way of Kings does because it doesn’t need to do so much introduction. It was great to get a better understanding of what was going on and follow the character development.

Zero Days is about a husband and wife pentesting team. After a job, he’s murdered and she becomes the prime suspect. I DNF’d this about a quarter of the way through because I couldn’t get into it. The premise sounded interesting but the descriptions of the tech parts seemed forced and the plot was only advancing because the main character kept doing things that she knew were poor decisions but she made them anyway. I read a summary of the rest of the book and I’m happy I didn’t finish it.

2023

A Wizard of Earthsea is the origin story of a young wizard. As I had heard before reading, the prose is fantastic. The author perfectly captures the voice of telling a folk tale, which was very enjoyable. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this as much as I’d hoped. I didn’t get drawn into the world or connect much with the events of the story.

There are many resources talking about the various societal ills fueld by big tech, but this is the first I’ve read looking at it from a Black feminist perspective. It details how systemic racism is replicated online and how search and information retrieval systems, primarily Google Search, are not objective, neutral pieces of technology. This was very interesting and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the place of tech companies in society.

I don’t normally read romance, but I like to add some variety and my wife said I would enjoy this one. It takes the Hallmark style trope of someone going from the big city to visit a small town and falling in love, leaving the partner behind and taking the perspective of the partner left in the city. It’s really funny, which I enjoyed.

Children of Dune shows us Arrakis after Paul Muad’Dib. I loved it. It’s even more complex than the first book and it was fascinating to read. I’ve heard many people say the books after this get weird, but I think it starts with this one. The exploration of the twins’ ancient consciousness is pretty out there. I’m not going to read the next few books immediately because I want to read other things but I’m really happy to have read the first three and will probably pick up the others at some point.

City of Light wraps up the Traveler’s Gate trilogy nicely. The problem set up in The Crimson Vault comes to the forefront and we get to see the characters we’ve been following since the first book figure out how to deal with it. There was a lot of good action in this one. The trilogy isn’t my favorite, but overall I think it was worth reading.

I’ve been dabbling in writing fiction this year and this was a good introduction to the process of writing short stories. It gave me a lot to think about and try to apply surrounding story structures and the writing process. The exercises in the book look useful, although I haven’t attempted any of them yet.

This is an audio drama, which was a new format for me. It is set up like a true crime podcast, in which a college student is investigating a cold-case murder of a woman nobody can remember. I enjoyed both the story and the audio drama format.

Dune is a sci-fi classic of a feudal dispute over a desert planet known as the only source of a valuable psychedelic drug. It took me a while to read because I went on a vacation in the middle and didn’t take it with me, but it was so worth the wait. The depth of the world and peoples in Dune are amazing and I loved the attention to detail in the cultural and ecological aspects of the book. The style of political drama with most of the violence off-screen even though there’s a war going on is great. I’ll definitely be reading the next few books in the series.

The sequel to Dune takes a massive departure from the tone of the first book. In the first book it’s easy to see Paul as the hero, but after 12 years of an interstellar jihad he seems powerless to stop, it’s difficult to see him in a positive light. The main plot is a conspiracy to dethrone Paul, mixed with Paul’s concerning visions of the future. I think this was every bit as good as the first one and I’m looking forward to the next book.

I read this because of how much I enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere, but didn’t get into it very much. It was worth finishing, but I found the writing frustrating because of how quickly she changed perspectives and didn’t find the plot and character development as compelling. The ending seemed to come out of nowhere and fell flat for me.

House of Blades is the first book in Will Wight’s trilogy The Traveler’s Gate, along with The Crimson Vault and City of Light. (Note: I’m writing the reviews for the whole trilogy at once, so I’m comfortable being a little more harsh about the first book given I still read the other two and liked them.)

The world and magic are really interesting, but as a self-contained story, this book is not very good. Most of the book is introducing characters and worldbuilding, with a bland plot tying it together. Several of the characters (including ones I liked in the subsequent books) are pretty obnoxious and behave in nonsensical ways to drive the plot. It does have some good parts: the magic system where individuals can call powers from outside territories into the world is really intreresting, and it does a good job of setting up the story for the next two books. Despite this not being very good on its own, I would recommend it to get into the rest of the story.

My partner and I don’t have kids, but we’d like to so I figured I’d read this to prepare for the future. The author recognizes the ways her relationship with her husband wasn’t working after they had a child and they go on a journey to fix those problems. The book looks at the ways both men and women reinforce traditional gender roles, how relationship dynamics change after having kids, and strategies for addressing the rampant lack of men contributing to their households. Although the title indicates a book for new (or expecting) mothers, this should be required reading for new dads too to help them get in the right mindset for a positive relationship.

Confronted with debilitating anxiety and panic attacks, the author decides to confront these by completing challenges that put him in uncomfortable situations to train his mind to push through adversity. The book discusses some elements of Buddhism, Stoicism, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a guide for how to handle difficult situations. The narrative was interesting but I skimmed a lot of the challenges because I had no interest in attempting them. I took a cold shower last night, but don’t think I’ll be attempting more.

There was a lot of hype for Iron Widow and it absolutely lives up to it. It tells the story of a girl rebelling against a deeply sexist society in the middle of a mecha war in which the male pilots are heroes and girls are continually sacrificed to keep the mechs running. The characters are interesting, there are strong anti-sexist and anti-capitalist themes, and the battle scenes were entertaining without drawing attention from the horrors of the system the main character fights against. I noticed some similarities to The Hunger Games, but didn’t think that detracted from the book overall.

The author is a newspaper writer who gets a grant to take a year off and write about his experience with America’s national parks. He spends a few weeks in a different park each month, all while processing his mother’s terminal diagnosis and death. This book was both a love letter to the national park system and a look into his experience processing the loss of his parents. I really enjoyed this one.

This is a great story looking at life in an idyllic American suburb when things aren’t so great. It touches on a lot of issues and handles them in a compelling way. The themes are all there without getting in the way of an interesting plot.

I wanted to spread out the John Green more, but my hold from the library came up sooner than expected so I read this shortly after Paper Towns. Looking for Alaska follows a group of students at a boarding school in Alabama. Like many other coming of age novels it touches on relationships between teenagers (romantic and other). Grief is a major focus of the second half of the book and I think it’s presented well. I’m happy I read these books in the order I did. I enjoyed Paper Towns, but if I hadn’t read it first I would have been annoyed because it feels like a worse retelling of Looking for Alaska.

This book serves as an introduction to meditation with a frame story of ABC journalist Dan Harris, meditation teacher Jeff Warren, and the team at 10% Happier going on a national tour trying to introduce meditation to the masses. It focuses on benefits of meditation and addressing barriers individuals face in establishing a regular practice. It was helpful in recognizing meditation doesn’t need to be a big deal to be beneficial. The example meditations were useful. I picked this up because I’ve been having trouble focusing my thoughts and keeping my mind from racing when I’m going to sleep. Ive just started meditation while reading the book, so I’ll see if I find benefits moving forward.

This one really didn’t land for me. The start is extremely slow because there are so many characters to introduce and you’re halfway through the book before anything really happens. The middle section of the book has some interesting plot and character development that slightly redeems it, but the main plot just ends like the author didn’t feel like coming up with an ending. I thought the book would be over at that point, but there were still 30 pages of followup on the characters that didn’t relate to anything else in the story.

This is a good introduction to the craft of writing non-fiction. There’s a lot of good advice on language use in general and Zinsser’s writing style is very entertaining. There are a few chapters specific to different types of writing that didn’t apply to me, but were still worth reading.

Orconomics is a fantasy satire set in a DnD type world, where a whole economy popped up surrounding adventurers fighting monsters and bringing back loot. It’s a funny criticism of big business and racist structures in society. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped from the description and comments I’d seen on Reddit, but I enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to reading the second book of the trilogy.

I decided to read more of John Green’s books after loving The Fault in Our Stars. I read this in one sitting in a few hours and enjoyed it. The story is entertaining and I spent a decent amount of the book chuckling at how dumb teenagers can be. Green says the book is a deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl trope but I don’t feel like it actually achieves that. It’s certainly not an egregious example of the trope because the girl in question has some depth, but the narrator has the personality of a paper bag, which really doesn’t help the author’s case. I still think it was worth reading, but it’s not great.

Former NASCAR driver turned commentator Dale Earnhard Jr. tells the story of the end of his driving career with a focus on his experience with concussions. He explains the crashes that caused the concussions, the symptoms he experienced, and his recovery with Dr. Micky Collins and the UPMC Sports Medicine Concussion Program. The level of detail is incredible, including daily notes he took on what he did and what symptoms he felt. This was a fascinating read and I think would appeal to a much broader audience than just NASCAR fans.

Another installment of the many adventures of nautical Indiana Jones. This was a fun one. It’s also the second of Cussler’s books centered around how awful the diamond industry is, so I’m getting the impression this guy really didn’t like diamonds. This one did stand out a bit from the rest of Cussler’s books in that there’s some interesting character stuff with the protagonist that makes him seem a little more human than normal.

I picked this up because I had wanted to read something about productivity and my library hold on another book hadn’t come up yet. The book is a series of stories about people and organizations who are exceptionally productive. The first few chapters dealt with psychological safety in the workplace, which was pretty interesting, but the later chapters didn’t seem to have much to do with the earlier ones and I didn’t find the stories as compelling. I wouldn’t recommend this one.

I think I’ve read this before, but I’ve had business on the mind recently so I decided to go through it again. The main point of the book is starting a business doesn’t have to be expensive. There’s some practical advice for finding ideas that can make money and getting them started without much initial investment. Most of the book is spent on examples of people who have built successful businesses this way which are interesting to read even if I won’t put any of it into practice.

This book sounded promising. The basic premise is increasing productivity by reframing a year as 12 weeks. Setting goals in a yearlong span can make it too easy to think you have so much time and you end up with a strong push at the end of the year to meet goals. A shorter timeframe for gives you that deadline to push for and helps you set goals and timing in shorter, more manageable groups. Then they go on to talk about the usual things in productivity: having a vision, measuring progress, and relying on discipline instead of motivation.

I haven’t DNF’d a book in a very long time but I had to here. The writing style was too “self-help” for my taste and there was too much telling the reader how great and groundbreaking this method is without any evidence of actual success. I gave up about halfway through.

The City of Dusk is the first book in a fantasy trilogy with an interesting combination of magic systems and good characters. In a world where four houses of the descendents of four gods are vying for the favor of an heirless king, the heirs of each house are trying to save their dying world. I really enjoyed this one, although some parts of the writing were frustrating, namely some cursing just for the sake of cursing. I’m looking forward to the second book of the trilogy coming out in August.

The Crimson Vault continues the trilogy from House of Blades. There’s an immediately noticeable improvement in the writing from the first book, which pulled me into the world. The story continues directly from the events of the first book and sets up a much larger struggle than the characters initially realized they were involved in. It’s ambiguous who’s in the right in this conflict, which I enjoyed. The characters improve a ton from the first book, which made it much easier to root for them. I found the pacing of the book odd, because there were spots in the middle of the story that felt like they could be the end of the book. I almost think it would’ve been better if most of the content of the first book was condensed into this one and the cutoffs for the three books were in different places.

Despite being in middle and high school when most of John Green’s books came out, I’ve never read any of them. After seeing how interesting he is as a person on social media, I wanted to try his writing out so I started with The Fault in Our Stars.

This book hurts. It’s about kids with cancer, so you know it’s going to hurt going in, but it still hurts. It’s vaguely philosophical, but in the kind of outlandish way teenagers think. The story is a beautiful attempt to distill the experience of being in love into a few months of extremely difficult life experience. Reading this is painful, but it’s a good kind of pain.

The Hero of Ages is the final book in Mistborn Era 1 and I really enjoyed it. I read the first two books in 2020 and 2021, but never finished the triology. The ending was fantastically written and wrapped the series very well. I missed a ton of foreshadowing, even in the first two books.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic story of a father and son travelling in search of a safer place to live. It details their experience along the road through a series of vignettes. The writing style is interesting and difficult to get into. There are no chapter breaks, no quotation marks, and very few dialogue tags, making it somewhat difficult to follow. Once I got used to the style though, his descriptions are incredible. McCarthy is able to impart visceral reactions to the world the characters find themselves living in. There’s a lot to think about in this book, but I was somewhat frustrated with the end. Without spoilers, I’ll say there is a decent chunk of foreshadowing that isn’t satisfied in my opinion. This book is very different from what I normally read, but I liked it.

The Way of Kings is the first book in the Stormlight Archive. Knowing it’s the first book in a long series, I was ok with it starting pretty slow. Overall, I enjoyed it but I think it meandered a bit too much and it wasn’t very clear where it was going. It could’ve been shorter. I enjoyed the world and characters and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

A princess is sent to an enemy kingdom to marry their king in order to fulfill a decades old treaty. She and others are working to prevent a war between the two nations that many consider inevitable. This one was very enjoyable. The magic system was a bit confusing at first, but I ended up enjoying it, and the plot and characters were really interesting.

I bought this in early 2022 after I started a new job working in Go becaues I wanted to read something to try to learn more about writing Go, but didn’t reach much of it until now. I think the book is great. The author implements an interpreter for a programming language from scratch and does a good job of explaining basics of how programming languages work. Each part of the code is tested, which helped me think more about effective unit testing. I hadn’t thought much about programming languages in a while, so I learned a lot. I might have to pick up the second book, which implements a compiler for the same language.

Full review as as standalone post.

2022

It’s difficult to understate how large of an effect this book had on me. It completely changed the way I look at nature, suburban development, and gardening. I’ll post a full review of this one at some point.

Clutter is a history of cluttered houses spawned by the author’s experience cleaning out her mother’s house. It goes through the beginnings of a societal attachment to stuff, present-day obsession with decluttering and organization, and the environmental impacts of constant consumption. It was pretty good, but I found it somewhat repetitive and not as engaging as I had hoped.

This book combines Cussler’s usual nautical theme with modern geopolitics and counterterrorism. It’s interesting how he mixes fictional leaders with fictionalizations of real-life leaders. Descriptions of some of the fictional events in Libya prompted me to read more about real events. I enjoy all of Cussler’s books, but this one seemed better than most.

Two Stanford design professors present a book version of a popular elective class about applying design principles to planning your life and executing that plan. The idea boils down to improving your life by monitoring what things are positive in your life, thinking broadly about possibilities to get you those things, prototyping those plans in a low-stakes manner, and continual progress. The authors present exercises in each chapter to help you execute this process. It was a really interesting read and I think the mindset is helpful even though I doubt I’ll do any of the exercises.

The first of the Oregon Files series has every bit of ridiculous action I’d come to expect from reading some of the later installments. I found some of the mystery difficult to follow, but it was overall a good read.

Jeanette McCurdy’s memior is an excellent and horrifying look at her life with an abusive mother who forced her into acting and supporting their family. It’s really interesting and she narrated the audiobook herself, which I always enjoy.

All the questions for the license exams for FCC amateur radio licenses are public, which makes studying for the tests fairly simple. You can try to learn the information thoroughly or just memorize the answers. Craig’s study guide books take an interesting approach. He says to avoid reading the questions and answers together because there are three wrong answers for every right one. Instead, he goes through descriptions of the concepts using wording similar to the questions and bolds sentences that are an answer to a question. This was a great start since it helped familiarize me with the wording of the correct answers as I was learning.

The only known source of an ultra-rare mineral needed for an ambitious military project is found to have gone down with the Titanic, prompting a search for the wreckage and a massive effort to raise the ship from the sea floor. This book was pretty interesting, although I kept having to remind myself that it was published before the wreck was discovered so many of the details are guesses that didn’t line up with the eventual discovery. The ending didn’t live up to what I expected from the rest of the book.

The sequel to The Thursday Murder Club has the same group of characters in another interesting mystery. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first one, but it was still good.

When I started this one, it seemed a lot different than most of Clive Cussler’s work that I’d read before. I realized this came from a few things: it was the first of his books I’d read that didn’t have a co-author and it was the first book he published. I don’t remember the famous Dirk Pitt being as much of a self-absorbed chauvinist as he appears in this one, but maybe the character was refined over time or his behavior was more acceptable in 1973.

This book is a fun murder mystery set in a retirement community in England. Told through the perspective of a group of the community residents, Osman perfectly captures the way I’d expect English retirees to talk and act.

A professional poker player explains common traps people fall into when making decisions and how thinking of uncertainty and decision making as a betting process can help people make better decisions. I love poker, so this was a great setting for me, but the poker analogies are general enough to be approachable if poker isn’t your thing.

Full review as a standalone post

2021

2020