Here is a travel writer that I haven’t read yet, and here is an area that I am curious about. The last time I read about Patagonia was when I read about Paul Theroux train journey from North America to South, and the two writers share a certain similarity in style.

Chatwin is very observant and analyzes people and situations well, just like Theroux. I liked Chatwin’s beautiful descriptions of nature – while Theroux focuses more on people and what they are doing.

This book started with an interesting story related to some “dinosaur” skin, and then ended in a very satisfactory way with the author finding the source and even a few fragments. But in between these two well chosen bookends there are many stories, broken into oddly short chunks. Some of them are about his journey, while others explore the history of people who have come before – pirates, relatives, revolutionaries, and criminals (even Butch Cassidy!)

I found myself wishing for more about what Patagonia was like at that time – but the focus here is on its history and it seemed a waste to be there and describe things that had happened long ago. There was little information about the author’s actual travels and logistics – these are things that are interesting to me.

Overall it was an interesting read but maybe it wasn’t quite my style.

Next I am reading Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan,

I think this is the first book I’ve read by Carl Sagan, and since I had enjoyed the movie I figured it would be a good place to start.

This was a fairly long book, so the story could be technically in-depth. I was surprised that there was so much weight on the technical side of things, and I really enjoyed this sort of nerdy style. Especially interesting were the predictions of “the future” of 1999, written by Sagan back in 1985. In some ways we’ve done a lot better than Sagan imagined, but as you might expect we’ve done worse, too.

He builds up the story well, telling of the female main character’s challenges entering the science field, and how she is underestimated her whole life. It is cool that there is this positive view of women in science back in 1985 – but I don’t know how much has changed since then. Probably not as much as he’d hoped.

On the downside all the tech-heavy writing leaves his writing of human issues and dialogue sort of lacking. Especially the conversations between characters felt unnatural and stilted. The author prefers to just download a bunch of information to the reader rather than introducing organically – and when it comes to talk of the future and technology it started to get old.

I can see when making the movie how they wisely cut out some of the fat and made a much more compelling story. I doubt fans of Sagan would complain about the book version, though. As for me, I’d prefer some version of the story that falls between the book and the movie.

Next I am reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin.

This book was a little frustrating for me to read. The subject matter is game design, and also it is a novel about love. Being a fan of both those things I expected to enjoy it more than I did.

The book starts with two young people growing up differently than others their age, and we follow their lives as they get older and more experienced with “life”. I usually like books that span a long time and show development in the characters. Unfortunately, the development here was strictly game-related.

Sometimes I see a movie or read a book where the characters don’t just communicate their feelings to each other. The reasons why might be a lack of self-confidence, or they are scared, or they just forget to do it. This book is filled with these moments where they could decide to do the right thing but don’t. And the author then distills as much drama as possible out of the results of this lack of communication, drawing out the drama whenever possible.

The big moments of this book are telegraphed and predictable, so when they finally come they have little impact. The author also has wedged in plenty of contemporary social issues: gender identity, racial identity, sexual harassment and assault, drugs, homosexuality. These felt like they weren’t organically part of the story to me.

This story reminded me a bit of Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, and I think Mitchell pulled off a similar story in a much more satisfactory way.

The story does revolve around gaming and developing games – a topic I am always interested in – but when the characters are discussing games and how to make them it felt similar to Ready Player One – just checking off names to give itself credibility.

It is too bad as this was an ambitious project, and the writer’s writing style was fairly easy to read. It sort of felt like a Young Adult book for Adults.

Next I am reading Contact by Carl Sagan.

This is a book about art and the creation of it. How do artists come up with new ideas? If you are an artist how can you push yourself and become more creative? And maybe everyone needs a little creativity now and then.

Something about this book made me feel like I was listening to some stoner dude in the bedroom of a house party surrounded by black light posters and lava lamps. It felt sort of quasi-Buddhist and statements weren’t really statements but possibilities. After a while every time he wrote “maybe”, “could”, or “can” I felt like there wasn’t much conviction here.

But it was full of interesting ideas on reviewing your filter, your habits, and thinking about how you think about things. There was insight into the life of an artist, and despite the image of a free and relatively stress-free life, artists have a need to create and to answer the call of creativity in a way true themselves is a (noble) burden.

Also I could see a little more into what it means to “understand” art. I enjoyed the content of the book, but apparently the style and presentation of the content – not so much.

Next I am reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

China plays a bigger role in geopolitical affairs every year, and since my knowledge of Chinese history is pretty out of date I thought I’d pick up this book.

If any country needs a short version of history, it should be this one. Even in this relatively short book I often got confused by all the names of emperors, heroes, villains – all of which came in and out of history’s favor over the long history of China.

But despite this I really enjoyed the read. The writer had a tough job to distill the episodes that had a significant historical impact, and include the histories that are echoing into today. It was written in a style that is easy to read, with clear attributions and what I felt was a neutral approach.

The author is a big fan of Chinese culture. She took an open-minded approach and avoided including any agenda (from whatever source) and tried to report as much as possible about what actually happened. In this case it illustrated why it is important to think about a country as more than just its government.

Next I am reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin.

This book was recommended because of its wisdom and advice on investing. I haven’t been investing very long (unfortunately) but this book would be a great one for people just starting out as well as for more advanced financial advisors or professional investors.

It was helpful to pick up some of the terms that are used in the investing world and to hear from someone who has seen a lot of ups and downs in the market. For the most part this book is aimed at the active investor – someone who is always trying to beat the market (in a good year) and limit losses (in a bad year). As you might expect it takes a lot of work and research to do something like this.

However my investment strategy is to simply follow the market using index ETFs and there is enough diversification (and what the author calls defensive investing) to be perfectly suitable for my needs. So as for specific strategies there wasn’t really much here for me.

Next I am reading The Shortest History of China by Linda Jaivin.

Non-fiction about a woman who truly is in tune with nature, and her surprising friendship with a fox living on her land.

There is some beautiful writing on nature in this book, and author has deep knowledge about the living things all around. She has worked as a park ranger, field guide, and her love for living things really shows in this book.

The format of the book is interesting – events don’t take place according to a traditional timeline. She gets into the heads of some of the animals and show what she imagines their lives and feeling might be like. What comes out of this is a unique view of nature, and I think she did accomplish that goal.

There are some allusions to her childhood (sounded tough) and how hard she has worked to learn and earn a doctorate degree, and you can tell she is intensely proud of her accomplishments and her intelligence. The Mensa group is mentioned (a few times) and I thought that her intelligence or what other people thought about her kind of detracted from the central story here – a unique relationship with an “unboxed” animal.

I was glad to read this book, because it was an unusual look into someone who really does live well with nature.

Next I am reading The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks.

I’ve seen Apocalypse Now before, and recently I was trying to remember if I had already read the story it was based on. After reading this novella the answer was no, I had not.

There are a few layers to the story, and despite some pretty outdated Anglo-centric language it remains a chilling tale of what really lies in the hearts of men. It is a short story but for me a bit too much philosophical musing. I especially like the descriptions of the African jungle and how the view of civilization shifted after the main character’s return.

I may have been assigned this book back in high school English class, but I’m sure that if I had read it then it would have gone right over my head. I’m not certain that it didn’t go over my head this time around to be honest. But it might be a lot to ask high school students to contemplate the nature of good and evil in a person’s heart.

Next I am reading Fox & I by Catherine Raven.

It has been a little while since I’ve read some science fiction, and this book was recommended as something a little different.

The book had all the right stuff for good science fiction – an interesting world (universe?), a deep backstory, and some likable characters. The story itself is quite short, however, and I was hoping for more details.

It seemed like some writers could really expand on the events of this story, and for whatever reason this author kept it short. Apparently there are more books in the series, so I may give the other ones a shot later on.

Frequently science fiction books end up in trilogies or series – what is it about the genre that lends itself to serialization?

Next I am reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

This one has been on my list of books to read for a while now. It is an eye-opening view of a reporter who after losing her job when her newspaper goes under finds entry-level jobs at McDonald’s, Amazon, and a call center company called Convergys.

What this book showed me was that these jobs have completely changed over the past twenty years, and these changes are focused on squeezing every bit of productivity out of each worker to the detriment to the happiness, health, and mental condition.

I’ve often heard people say that “flipping burgers” back when they were younger was a time that was carefree, with low wages but low stress. This book outlines the changes that employers have made to automate scheduling through software and algorithms to use the least amount of workers to do the job if they are working all out.

The workers (including this author) are pushed to their limits, and when they leave or quit there are plenty more to replace them. The author reminds the reader that she always had the option to leave – but for most of her coworkers that option was much less viable.

The book was grim, but also it showed the cost of rock-bottom prices and 24 hour customer service. Sometimes the tone got a little over dramatic, and although there were sources for some of the academic journals cited other times it felt like more word-of-mouth when relating the point of view of the workers themselves.

She wrote in a very approachable way, and it was fun to kind of sneak into these jobs and see what they are like on the inside. But in the end it tells a pretty depressing story, and shows just how easy some of us have it.

Next I am reading Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather.

The second time reading this was as good or better than the first. This time around I focused more on the tone, the writing, and the characters – and you could see the effort and skill that went into every sentence of this novel.

One genre of fiction I’ve seen become more popular lately is the “cozy” book. While not entirely fitting into that category, this book is sort of the ultimate cozy book for me. The whimsical, almost fairy-tale like tone, the main character as we get to know his situation, history, and how he expects a gentleman to behave.

It is hard to define exactly why I like this so much. If I could figure that out, I could look for other books with a similar style. So far I haven’t found anything quite like it.

I am looking forward to re-reading this in the future, after a few years, and I’m sure it’ll be just as good then.

Next I am reading On the Clock by Emily Guendelsberger.

This is the second (or third?) time reading this book – I was recently thinking about the story so thought I’d read it again to see how it held up.

For the most part it was as good as I remembered it. Lots of details that I didn’t recall from previous reads, and a couple of twists that I luckily had forgotten about.

Of course I knew the big surprise delivered towards the first part of the book, so it wasn’t really a WTF? moment for me this time. But it was good to see how well Crichton set up his stories, and his skill at taking on topics with a blend of science, realism, and fiction.

Without an understanding of quantum mechanics I can’t really comment on whether his scientific portions held up, but I did like the blend of action and (pseudo)science.

For another re-read I am going back to Amor Towles A Gentleman in Moscow. I really liked it the first time – one of my favorite novels ever – so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes the second time around.

This is one of those, “I heard the book was better than the movie” choices. I don’t remember the movie very clearly, so I thought it would be a good time to read the book.

There are a lot of good stories here – mainly about the survivors of a zombie apocalypse. The stories are told by the survivors in a sort of interview/Q&A style, and told in the past tense as the Zombie War has already been won.

Because the storytelling style is unique it lends a certain amount of realism. Lots of characters use lingo that was created during the war, with the author providing footnotes to explain them. Often the interviewees will treat information they give out as common knowledge (which of course it is not for the reader) and the methods that the writer has to employ to overcome this gap didn’t feel very graceful to me.

In the end the format of the book caused more problems than it was worth. I’d have liked to hear some of these stories told in the first person as they happened, but I suppose that once the author committed to this format they had to follow through.

So a so-so zombie book, but not as interesting as I had hoped.

Next I am re-reading Timeline by Michael Crichton.

What starts out as a story of a hired assassin with a heart of gold turns into an improbable but I think successful meta exercise on writing.

This book is set in an entirely real (no spooky ghosts in this King book) contemporary America just before the pandemic begins. It outlines the situation and places the lead character in a position of writing a book to pass as a writer. This gives the author (Stephen King) a chance to write about an author who is in fact a killer. King skillfully sets up the situation so we can explore the power of writing, and get a taste of why he likes it so much.

It takes some writing skill to get us to care about (and start to really like) a hired killer. The way the story develops is a little too perfect – the right things happening at just the right moments – but I was willing to forgive based on being a fan of his other work. And I thought that the “book within a book” device was a little forced. I even cringed a little when the typeface changed – and had a feeling of dread near the end when the current events of the “real” story had the typeface as well. It is hard to explain without giving away anything here.

This novel was a quick read but I really enjoyed the time I spent with it. Next I am reading World War Z by Max Brooks.

This is my first time reading anything by Faulkner, and unsure where to start I chose this based on a few comments in other books.

My initial impression was confusion. The book introduces a lot of characters early on, peeking into their minds as they describe things from their perspective in a stream of consciousness style. I’ve read more modern books written in a similar way and it made me wonder if this was the first book to be written in this style.

Characters appear and disappear suddenly, speak from dead, kids speak like kids do, and the initial bout of confusion turned me off. Fortunately as I read things cleared up a bit, but there is a lot to unpack here after reading.

This book did an excellent job of showing the reader what life was like back then for poor people living in America, and it was tragic and poignant. It was less dated than I had expected given that it was originally published in 1930.

So in the end I liked the book for the skill of writing rather than the storytelling style, and for the ending which was absolutely perfect. Will I read more by Faulkner? Still not sure about that but we’ll see!

Next I am reading Billy Summers by Stephen King.