I picked up this book after seeing it referenced on somebody’s “must read” list, and then again seeing it used as a teaching aid for a negotiation course that I am teaching. I read the fifth edition, but I do hope it will be updated in the future.

In short, this book explains why so many people use certain techniques to get you to comply with their requests. Cialdini calls these people “compliance professionals” and leaves it up to you whether to consider it a duragatory label or not. This book shows clear evidence and background for the assertions within (the author is a professor of psychology with a focus on social psychology) and he outlines many interesting studies that reinforce his points.

He explains why humans behave the way they do when responding to requests for compliance, and gives thorough descriptions of the main “weapons” of social influence (and also defenses that we can employ).

Throughout this book I found myself remembering instances in my own life when I faced these situations, and it was surprising how commonly these “weapons” are used. I guess that was what struck me the most: I had expected the science of influence to be a bit more sophisticated than it is.

Granted, the world has changed, and I think an updated version exploring the age of misinformation, cult leadership, and social media influence (and influencers) would be informative. As the author writes in his book, the world is filling up with more information at an accelerating rate, and we need the right skills to process the input we’re getting (or even to decide whether to process it in the first place).

This was an educational book for me. Thoughtfully included were some summaries at the end of each chapter which will be helpful later on to quickly refresh what I picked up.

On a side note, living in Japan I have noticed that several of these “weapons” of influence are much rarer than in the United States. It is interesting that different cultures have different susceptibilities when it comes to how they are influenced.

Next I’m headed back into the fantasy realm, with The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.

This book was a clever retelling of one of the minor Greek gods, filled with all the drama and angst and celestial infighting but this time told from the point of view of a woman.

The shift in the point of view makes for a great story, and it is written in a modern style with makes it feel fresh. The storytelling is great, and the unexplainable motivations of the gods and their own despicable behavior is all here with a first person account from Circe herself. I really enjoyed this tale, and even knowing how things would turn out (the fate of Odysseus and Medea for example) you are really pulled into the events.

I like this idea of telling familiar stories in a completely different way. The author did a great job here in helping to understand the motivations behind each character, be they god or mortal (or a little of both). It must have taken quite a bit of research to write this book, but I’m hoping that she’ll write more in this style in the future!

The next book I’m reading is Influence: Science and Practice by Robert B. Cialdini.

When we visited Granada, Spain we spent some time walking through the beautiful Alhambra fortress and the Old Town nearby. Because of this familiarity with the location I selected this book, set (at first) in the same fortress and telling the tale of a palace concubine of the last sultan, on the run from the very creepy Spanish inquisition.

The book has plenty of exotic locales, and with magic weaved into the story there are certainly some surprises and interesting situations. The writing style for me was a bit too flowery but the descriptions of the countryside and ocean were really well done. Especially interesting characters were the various jinn who live somewhere between the real world and hell – and their unique way of speaking and understanding their nature while others are oblivious.

Despite these good points, overall I didn’t really enjoy the book as much as I had expected to. A couple of reasons: characters I couldn’t relate to, a somewhat derivative plot, and unclear motivations of the main characters.

The two main characters of this book, Fatima and Hassan, were fully grown adults that behaved like children. The way they acted selfishly and complained like little kids about just every inconvenience made me want to fast forward through their dialogs. They have lived a pampered lifestyle inside the sultan’s palace, but they didn’t show any personality traits that I could identify with. We’re stuck with these characters through the whole book, and I couldn’t help wishing that they would grow up a little faster.

The storyline reminded me a lot of the Lord of the Rings – and maybe a little of Narnia. With the exception of the unusual destination at the end of the book I felt like we spent a lot of time on the journey with only a few close calls evading pursuit to make things interesting.

Maybe part of this long journey was the message of the book, but I didn’t really get any clear idea about what the point was – and after reading through a pretty long story you’ve got to hope for some kind of satisfactory conclusion. It just didn’t quite work for me.

Next I’m reading Circe, by Madeline Miller.

Getting away from science fiction for a bit, this is a cookbook containing recipes from African American cooks spanning the last two centuries. The author has put together a good mix of dishes that go beyond what people typically consider as “soul food”.

I’ll start off by saying that after reading this book from the library I then went onto Amazon and bought a copy to keep for myself. The recipes in this book are ones that I often want to try to make here in Japan – you rarely see any of these dishes at restaurants here and if you do they are completely changed to fit the tastes of Japanese customers.

Having said that, the book is more than just a list of recipes. The writer has done a lot of research to find recipes through history that were cooked by black people, whether they were enslaved, free, or from other countries. There is a lot of talk about “reclaiming” a recipe and plenty of information about people and the history around their interpretation of a dish. For me, I’m just looking for delicious food – so I don’t really worry about what color the cook was, what race can say the are the originators of a dish, what label should be applied to what variety of dish, etc. etc. So this was extraneous information for me and I just focused on the recipes.

I’ve noticed that I tend to prefer reading books on food that focus on the food (the ingredients) itself. For some reason the culture and the individual people who cook the food have little interest for me – so in this book most of that information wasn’t important. Dropping names and celebrating people’s accomplishments are better suited for the biography section – just give me that delicious food!

Luckily this book delivers on that and I’m looking forward to trying out some of the recipes soon!

Next is The Bird King, by G. Willow Wilson.

As part of a recent push to read some new and fresh science fiction, this book was recommended on a website listing good new sci-fi. It is a debut novel by the author, and it turned out to be a really well-written book that had me reading through it (almost) non-stop.

Told from the point of view of a spaceship AI (which turns out to be weird in a different way than you might expect) the book describes a very lively and interesting universe. The story manages to work on several different scales – the operations and politics of local occupying governments, the ships and troops handling annexations, and even the lonely mission of a single person.

There are several unique points about this book – some work well and others seemed a little too confusing for me to consider them effective. For one example, in the major society that is depicted here there is no overt gendering (with language or otherwise) so everyone is called a “she”, which is (intentionally) confusing at first. As other societies are introduced you kind of figure this out, but I’m still not sure what the point was other than to throw the reader off initially.

But another unique point that worked really well was the idea of the “ancillaries” in the title – the AI of the ships is not only limited to the ship itself but also is spread through once human entities that are implanted with technology allowing the ship’s AI to control their bodies and sense the world through them. This makes for a real challenge for the writer – to describe simultaneous events seen from many different perspectives of what is actually the same consciousness. If you can divide your consciousness, is it possible for them to be separated? What happens then? Can you disagree with other parts of yourself? This is introduced slowly at first and the reader gradually is able to get used to it – it really is a unique and interesting way to tell a story. Later the book explores this idea in much more detail, so the mild learning curve was much appreciated.

So I really liked this one, and there are two more in the series. After a while I’m definitely coming back to continue the story and see how it goes. This was a very impressive book for a first time author!

Next is Jubilee, by Toni Tipton-Martin.

When I saw the movie “Inception” I was especially drawn to a scene where the main character and his wife had created a world within their dreams. The world was represented as a huge empty city slowly disintegrating as the ocean pounded at the edges. They lived there for years while in a dream. Maybe some people saw loneliness in that huge empty city, but I liked the emptiness, and felt the call to explore.

This book by Susanna Clarke reminded me a lot of that part of the movie. The book starts off with a profound feeling of disorientation and confusion for the reader – and we have to trust the author to tell the story their way. In this case it is worth it to keep reading.

There are at first many questions, and then there is the character of Piranesi, who is wonderfully earnest and innocent and self-sufficient. We watch his life and his environment and gradually we learn more. The writing of the setting is beautiful, and the relatively short novel moves at a quicker pace. When a mystery develops I was completely absorbed, and in the end I didn’t want to leave the world that the writer had created.

There are countless ways to write a book and tell a story. How you may start, finish, create, destroy – there is no need to stick to a formula. The writer of this book clearly did something completely new and I was fascinated. There are no rules with books, and this particular book was a powerful reminder of that.

The next book to read is Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie.

I haven’t read Ken Liu’s books before reading this collection, so I was going in blind. There are some parallels with another author I have read: Ted Chiang.

Both writers are Asian American, both explore themes related to fantasy (although Liu’s book is more technology and race focused) using short stories as a medium.

The stories in this book were sort of hit or miss for me. I couldn’t help but feel like the writer started with an interesting idea, shoe-horned in some shallow characters to illustrate the idea, and then checked the idea off the list and went on to the next one. Some stories were really well-written, including “State Change” about a quiet woman living in a world where people’s souls are contained in ordinary objects, “The Paper Menagerie” about bridging the cultural differences between generations, “All the Flavors” telling the legend of the Chinese god of war through a telling of Chinese immigrants to the early American West, and “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” which tells a fable-like story of a clever man who pays a heavy price to preserve history.

Those were the good ones, but the rest of the stories felt too contrived to me. I’m sure the writer’s full length novels have the opportunity to flesh out the characters – writing short stories gives less chance to really develop things – so I may check out his novels in the future.

Next is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

I recently found a list of recommended science fiction and fantasy novels put together by writers and fans, and so this was the first book I read off the list.

It starts off with a mysterious situation, and little by little reveals information, in such a way that you end up turning the pages to get to the bottom of the mysteries that are presented. This book has foundations in biology and science fiction, but it also has influences from Jules Verne, and the chock-full-of-mysteries TV show Lost.

The developments of the plot are largely happening within one character’s head – both in real time and in their memories. I would have liked to have more of the interactions with the group that starts the book, and the organization that sent them, but the focus here tends to be on the main character, who describes herself as anti-social so at least that is consistent. There are plenty of scenes that are creepy, scary and full of tension, and I thought this story would make a pretty good video game.

The ending for me wasn’t quite as satisfactory as I had hoped, but I think the book is the first of a series of three. Maybe this book is a sort of prologue to the next one. I’ll wait a while and if I’m still thinking about the events of the first book maybe I’ll come back to this series.

My next read is The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu. Reading short stories for a while might be a good change of pace!

Talk about a timely book – it seems like the world is full of misinformation recently and maybe that is why I was attracted to this title.

The author, an experimental social psychologist and professor of psychology at Wake Forest University, got into the field of bullshit analysis after being inspired by a short essay on the prevalence on bullshit in society and the damage it does. Here he has collected research and information on how to not only detect bullshit, but how to defend against it and even (if you have the courage) to call it out.

Beyond the review of the Scientific Method and the calls to trust in science you can find some great examples of all sorts of bullshit that you find in life today, and some great stories from the past to illustrate the danger of thinking without critical analysis. I especially enjoyed the modern examples, and the author can’t help but point out a few politicians (I’ll bet you can guess which ones) and celebrities as especially guilty of slinging bullshit.

The book is structured in a logical way, with plenty of footnotes and research to back up his arguments (as you would expect in a book on this topic). I read through it pretty quickly, and with the exception of the last section – a sort of call-to-arms to eradicate bullshit across the world (which sounded a little naive to me) – it was a decent book on thinking a little more about what you are hearing and how to best analyze it.

I think it will be difficult to keep his advice in mind over time, and that is directly related to his point that thinking critically is hard work, and one of the reasons that we see so much un-checked bullshit around. This will take some effort, but I’ll do my best to keep his points in mind in the future.

Next is Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.

Oh wow – here’s a great book. I haven’t read much of Steinbeck’s work and I was pleasantly surprised to find this just so easy to read. Sometimes books that are touted for their “greatness” can be hard to get into, but maybe thanks to the familiar setting of a rural California valley it caught me right up in the story.

One of the pleasures of reading this book was absorbing the wide variety of themes and characters. They really bring to life the place and diversity of human beings that live there. Steinbeck doesn’t spend time explaining every single event that happens in each character’s life, but things are hinted at and set up in a very satisfying (and sometimes tragic) way.

The story is told from various points of view while moving through time, and sub-stories build on each other to contribute to an overall theme that is surprisingly brought into view near the middle of the book (almost like breaking the “fourth wall”). But besides this main theme, the portraits of people, what drives them, and what it means to be a good person – it is a great writer that can juggle all these into a cohesive whole. I’ll be thinking about this book for a long time, and for me that is the surest sign of a very well-written book.

Next book is “The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit” by John V. Petrocelli. The second book I’ve read recently with “bullshit” in the title, but no special reason for selecting it other than I’ve been enjoying books on critical thinking recently.

Years ago I saw the animated movie and recently I read that the book version was very cleverly written so I picked up this book from the library.

Clever is the right word here – the story is complex, and with magic in the air it can be pretty tricky to figure out what exactly is going on. Magic doors opening into other cities (or worlds) allows for the plot to develop quickly and suddenly, and the relationships between the main characters are especially entertaining.

If I had to criticize this book at all I’d say that the ending winds up rather abruptly – with a Scooby-Do kind of exposition to explain what happened all along, but in the end this is a kid’s book, so a clear explanation is probably the best way to go. I understand there are two more books in the series, but I’m not sure whether I’m anxious to read them.

What I will do, however, is watch the animated movie again with a sharper eye on the characters and story. Next up is “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck.

Around ten years ago David Graeber wrote a short article for a magazine focusing on the phenomenon (and the implications) of what he called “bullshit jobs”. This book goes into more detail analyzing what these jobs are, why they exist, and what kind of financial and psychological damage they are doing.

Most of the book is based on the stories sent in to him after the initial article ran, and he has organized these stories (and subsequent interviews) into a threads that link together into a broader view of what it means to have one of these jobs. The stories are well-told and fun to read – one of the rules of having a bullshit job is that you don’t talk about your bullshit job, so getting this information straight from the sources is enlightening.

One possible weakness I saw with this book is that the author really makes some big assertions based on what (to me) seems like a small data set. The people who read his original article and then sent in stories of their own bullshit jobs probably don’t accurately represent all of society – and they may even have felt the need to exaggerate some points to make their story more illustrative.

Overall the book was informative to read, and the author’s thoughts on some industries that are especially prone to “bullshit” jobs are enlightening (for example, the financial services industry). The end of the book offers some ideas for moving beyond these jobs and suggests Universal Basic Income as an idea worth exploring to allow people to have more freedom in choosing what they want to do with their lives.

I enjoyed reading this book! Next I’m reading “Howl’s Moving Castle” by Diana Wynne Jones.

This was a short book that possibly was written with a younger audience in mind, but was perfectly entertaining for adults as well.

It is always great to settle into a Stephen King book – there is something comfortable for me about his writing style. I quickly started to empathize with the protagonist of this one, and the story was quickly paced with a satisfying payoff at the end.

One surprising thing for me was how many cultural references were included as the boy in this story grew up. Using these to provide some background helped make it clear that this story was happening in our world. I’m wondering if these references will still be as effective after 20 years or so. But maybe that’s not a big concern of Stephen King.

This was a quick read – I could read stuff like this all day every day and not complain. Hopefully there are more books like this in the pipeline!

After this book I tried to delve into Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It is a monster book – and I found that I just couldn’t get into the story after reading through about 150 pages out of the 760 pages in the book. I gave up on the book for now, but maybe I can take it to a deserted island and try again someday. Instead, the book I’m reading next is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.