Some older science fiction this time, and my first book by this author. Written back in the 1970s, but it still holds up well today.

The story is quick to pull you in, and this is one of the more cerebral sci-fi books I have read. There is a lot of psychology (including a clever psychiatric software program) throughout, and an odd focus on sexuality that eventually turned out to be part of the story.

Even though most of the story happens out there in the uncharted galaxies, the climax occurs somewhere more mundane, and it was a very tense ending – I loved it.

Also the book was unique in that it used short snippets of background information in such a way as to make the whole thing seem more lifelike and real. Sometimes this is done in other books but this much more effective. Space station classified ads, emails from side characters, and excerpts from academic courses contributed to make the ending all the better.

I liked this book – and I’ll be looking for more of his work in the future.

Next I’m reading two books in parallel, one is The Science of Spice by Stuart Farrimond, and the other is Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

I haven’t read much on archaeology although I’ve had an interest ever since high school. Maybe the influence of Indiana Jones was the driving force, but of course the reality of the science is different and I wanted to learn some more about it.

This book provided a pretty good layman’s view of four cities that were exceptional in their time, that rose and then for various reasons fell and faded away. It is written with a sort of millennial generation style so that it is pretty easy to get into.

While reading this book I was struck by just how much guesswork is involved in digging up a lost civilization. There is only so much that lidar and magnetometers can tell you before you have to use your imagination and see the lost scenes that are around you. The author is skilled at this, and helps to bring these cities alive for the reader. On the other hand, of course these are educated guesses, and the author points out that they could certainly be off the mark.

One of the more modern schools of thought in contemporary archaeology (at least according to this book) is the idea of studying the activities of the “regular people”. Previously investigations tended to focus on things that were unusual, big or dramatic. Instead in this book they focused on finding how most people lived, and reading about how they sussed out these things was really interesting.

I enjoyed this book and learned a lot – which is a great combination when reading new books. I get the sense that this book might not be as dry as other books in the field, so if the topic holds an interest for you this is a good first step.

Next I’m reading Gateway by Frederik Pohl.

I keep a long list of books I want to read, added to a website called GoodReads, and whenever I am looking for my next book I see what is available from that list at the library. Often times I can’t remember how the book got onto my list, so I am truly going in blind. When reading ebooks, I don’t even have the sleeve or back cover to get a summary.

Sometimes this produces a profoundly sublime experience – I don’t even know the genre I am reading so there is plenty of room for surprise and mostly they are pleasant. However this book produced some surprises that had me going, “WTF?”

This book is set in New York in 2015, including all the technology and pop culture from the time, and already six years afterwards it feels dated. The story revolves around a couple of people in love, and then careens out of control to include witches on forgotten New York islands off the shores of Brooklyn, spooky hackers and underground dwelling demons.

I suppose I could have gone along with the story but since it started out so normally I couldn’t really suspend disbelief long enough to get caught up in it. In addition, I thought the dialogue between characters had a amateurish quality that didn’t ring true, and too much needless info was written in that could have easily been cut.

I’m no writer and it isn’t for me to judge, but it seemed like a good editor would have gone a long way here. Let’s hope the book turns out to be a learning experience for the author.

The next book I’m reading is Four Lost Cities, a non-fiction book on ancient lost cities by Annalee Newitz.

The final book in this series, and everything gets all wrapped up in a surprisingly short book. In fact the book felt rushed, as if the author had something better to do and had to get this out of the way.

Like the others in the series, this book leans heavily on the clever and witty comments, and less on character development and world-building background. As usual I had hoped to hear more about the normal people, and they are all summarized in a very broad way over a few pages.

The ending and how it comes about is less than satisfying, and without giving things away we once again have the tricky situation of is the character really dead or not.

Overall I was disappointed in the series overall, but very entertained with the characters and how they are clever/smug/witty/reprehensible. A good book on a small scale, but lacking when considered as a space epic.

Next I’m reading The Changeling by Victor LaValle.

After reading a lot of John Grisham when I was younger I stopped for a while, and only recently I have been dropping in now and then to read some of the books that I missed. Especially his recent stuff has been really good – written lean and moving at a brisk pace through the stories.

When I go back to some of his earlier books (like this one) you can see where his pacing needed work, and where he started finding his targets.

This book takes place largely in Italy, and I remembered that he came back to Italy in a big way later on in Playing for Pizza, one of my favorites of his. While reading this book it felt like he was just relating his own personal experiences in Italy (except for the hit squads and spy cameras). The language lessons went on and on, and the cultural notes seemed like they didn’t add a whole lot to the story, although I’m sure Italian readers really liked to see them.

The tail end of the book feels more like a thriller and has a kind of traditional ending, but I was hoping for more of the main character on the run. Maybe there is a book genre out there with the main character trying to hide and make a new life – hmm… I‘ll do some research.

Next I’m reading The Last Emperox by John Scalzi to wrap up that trilogy.

This was a book that told an epic tale that crossed between many characters, following a long span of history (and future). It also managed to deliver on the promise of being an ode to stories and the power they have over us. This book has mystery, travel, love, hope, change and redemption, great character and world building, and even some secret Easter eggs for the characters to find.

It is hard to imagine the process of writing a story like this. At first there is a sense of confusion for the reader as we wonder what exactly is happening, but as usual it pays off to be patient and keep reading. We start to see connections here and there, and also see the parallels in our own lives.

I couldn’t help but think of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as a comparable work with a similar (albeit more rigid) structure. I seem to like stories that have an epic scope – from birth to death we see how someone deals with the cards life has dealt them – and see their relatively short life in perspective with the thread of history.

So this was a story well-told, and one I’m sure will stay with me for a long time. One of my favorite books I’ve read this year.

Next I’m reading The Broker by John Grisham.

I’m not sure how this book was recommended to me – for some reason I have the faint memory of it being related to the popularity of Squid Game (a show I’ve never seen). The idea of this book intrigued me, but ultimately the characters and their relationships didn’t appeal to me so I was left disappointed with this one.

The idea that I liked was that in a small town “where nothing happens” kids in the school contribute some money every year into a big pot, and then award that significant sum to the person who wins a series of games they call the “Panic”. Two people are chosen every year to organize the event, and the students compete in dangerous events until they are left with just one winner.

Part of the reason I didn’t like this book is that it is probably written for young adults who are struggling with their own issues of confidence, bravery, and also the importance of being cool and/or looking cool to their peers. There is plenty of story based on these themes, and not much on overcoming fear, which I thought would be a stronger theme.

I think there could be comparisons to the Hunger Games here, but that series had enough futuristic elements to help carry the story. This book is firmly set in a boring small town in contemporary America, with adults you can’t relate to and not much to look forward to in the future. Maybe contemporary America is dystopian enough these days, I don’t know.

So this book didn’t really grab me, and it was a bit of a chore to finish it. I guess it will be a movie or mini-series in the future, though. I don’t think I’ll be in line to see it.

Next I’m reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.

By one of the writers of Game of Thrones, this book tells an intriguing story encompassing a week during the siege of Leningrad during World War II. About a couple of new friends, a unique mission, and plenty of starvation.

The author really writes characters well – it was easy to get caught up in the story, and the scenes in the bombarded city of Leningrad were excellent. This is great writing full of detail and depth, but still pushing the plot so that you don’t want to put down the book.

There were some rough parts of the story, some parts that seemed unbelievable or added just to illustrate the situation of the siege and the people caught up in it. Through it all the likable young characters kept it from sinking into despair and dread – there was always some hope out there, and everything is connected in the end in a very satisfactory way.

Next I’m reading Panic by Lauren Oliver.

Mark Manson knows how to write a catchy title, maybe from his long experience writing blog articles. This is the second book of his that I’ve read, and I’m not sure I liked it as much as the first. This book is all about how humans (extrapolated from Americans?) think according to what the author calls the “feeling brain” and the “thinking brain”.

He writes in a very amusing style and does a great job of breaking down very complex topics into easy to consume pieces. Immanuel Kant’s ideas on enlightenment? No problem – in just a few pages he gives a clear summary of where Kant is coming from and where others went as well.

While I enjoyed the book overall, I thought that maybe the best target for this book is people who are struggling with mood swings, depression or facing uphill challenges in their lives right now. This is the kind of encouragement that could really help people steady their minds and deal with issues much bigger than what typical self-help books deal with.

At the end there is an eye-opening section on developments in artificial intelligence, and the way it is written makes it sound like big changes are right around the corner. I’m not sure if I believe it is coming quite that soon, but it was exciting to read. This might be a direction I read more of in the near future.

Next I’m reading City of Thieves, by David Benioff.

I read these two books back to back to finish the series. Usually I’d mix in some other books in between, but something about the second book in the series made me want to just continue on right away.

At first you might assume that the series was so good I couldn’t stop, but that wasn’t the reason why. The second book was really different from the first, and it lost a lot of that space/epic feeling and instead focused on life on one planet (and its space station). This was a big departure from the tone of the first book, and I wasn’t sure I liked it very much. It introduced many new characters and for me it just kind of lost a step.

However upon reading the third and final book, I could understand that the second book was all about putting characters in the right place and development for the end. The conclusion was satisfying, although it did get a little corny sometimes. Some alien characters were just a little too goofy and over the top to break the spell of belief in the story.

In general I liked the series, and I wish we’d get some more from the main characters in the future. Especially the idea of the ancillaries and AI systems, that can see and act in multiple places at the same time makes for slightly mind-bending reading, and I’d like to see more of that in the future.

Next I’m reading Everything Is Fucked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson.

In keeping with my recent reading theme of critical, open thinking, I chose this book to read to find out more about how cults are formed and the otherwise normal people who join them.

This book talks about the evolution of what cults are, and (most interesting to me) how things have shifted to online thanks to the internet and social media.

As someone who works with language, it was nice to see a thorough analysis of how language can be used to co-opt and corrupt people’s thinking skills and shut down critical thought. The writer kept things pretty light in terms of academic research, but made a good case for her position.

But the parts about social media were especially interesting for me. As someone who has pretty much shut off social media from their life it was good to hear the voices of people who have not only let it into their life but now can’t live without it. In a book that explains that cults are built using “insider language”, there were many words used by the author that I didn’t recognize, and that people who live and breathe social media apparently understand right away.

I was hoping to read a little more about the influence of cultish thinking on American politics in recent years, but this topic was only touched on – maybe because there is enough on that topic to write another complete book.

This was an accessible, interesting book that I was glad I read. Now I’m reading Ancillary Sword, a sequel to a previous book I read by Ann Leckie.

It has been a long time since I’ve studied physics, and I figured things have come a long way since I was in the classroom, so I picked up this book to get a laymen’s view of the current state of physics in 2020.

This was no light read! Dark matter and energy, bosons, neutrinos, axions and more appear in this book, and surprisingly the author (a Nobel laureate) makes it reasonably simple to take these in. I won’t pretend that I understood completely, but this book did really spell out some things that I hadn’t really thought about before. I was more comfortable with the chemistry than the quantum mechanics, but as the book points out, they aren’t all that different – it is just a matter of how deep you go into matter.

The “ten keys to reality” are pretty interesting on their own, and I walked away from this book with a healthy respect for the power of science. You can understand just how powerful a tool it is to measure and start to understand everything from the interior of each atom of your body all the way to the outer reaches of the universe, 13.8 billion light years away.

This was another book that had me scratching my head and thinking in a different way. I’m enjoying these kinds of challenging reads now and then.

Next I am reading Cultish, by Amanda Montell.

I checked out this book from the library because I wanted to get some insight into Turkish recipes, and happily enough it also had recipes from all over the Eastern Mediterranean region. There are some good Greek, Cypriot, and even Afghani recipes included.

This book has some dramatic and colorful photos – some of the best photos I’ve seen for a cookbook. The author traveled around the region with a professional photographer in tow, and the results are great.

I found quite a few recipes I’d like to try in this book – so I can’t wait to cook them and see how they turn out. Lots of veggies and soups, which is pretty much our focus during the winter months.

If I had to critique, I’d say the writing of the interludes – the descriptions of the places she went and the people she met – were a little too breathy and dramatic for my taste. My focus is always on the food rather than the people, but the author does tend to bring herself into the story a bit more than what felt comfortable to me. Still, her focus is on the humanitarian crisis in the area and her problem with borders – and her history in activism makes it natural for her to point these issues out. I skipped ahead to hear about the dishes and where they came from.

Overall a good cookbook – we’ll see how the recipes turn out!

I wasn’t quite sure what I thought about this book after reading it. It is written well, full of beautiful descriptions of the Alaskan wilds, and the challenges that awaited settlers there back in the early 1900’s. Maybe it is the story that I had trouble with.

The two main characters are trying to make a go of it in Alaska, and discover someone very special outside their house in the cold of winter. This book dances on the border between reality and fantasy, and never really lets the reader know what we are dealing with. I feel like in another book I might like that kind of dangling feeling between the real and unreal, but in this I just felt like it was drawn out too long and in the end maybe didn’t have a lot to do with the resolution of the characters. What changed here? What is the same?

I do like books that try to tell a story in an experimental style – and like all experiments there is both a risk of failure and a potential for greatness. For me, this book wasn’t an inspiration. However with the writer’s ability I am sure they will have more interesting stories to tell in the future.

Now I’m reading a book on contemporary physics, Fundamentals: 10 Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek.

With Trump out of the spotlight since the beginning of the year, I have been enjoying a pretty stress-free time reading the news. I originally gave him a lot of leeway in trying to be a president, but it seemed like after a couple of years he just focused on his own ego and doing what he thought his base would like. This book focuses only on the last (very eventful) year of his presidency.

The book is co-written by journalists from the Washington Post, and is really sort of a chronological timeline of disaster, told from a liberal point of view. I prefer my news without commentary or significant bias, so I don’t usually read sources like the Washington Post or Fox News. For the most part the book tells just the facts, which are damning enough. Still, I got a little uncomfortable with some sections that seemed to try to push the reader towards outrage when I am willing to bet they are already there.

It was good to have the whole story in one volume, with references and a consistent timeline, to remember how things went. I was surprised to discover that I had read about most of these events from other sources at the time they happened – I didn’t know I was so up to date. This book is very comprehensive, and I think it’ll be important to have this out and available to the public so we don’t forget just how bad it got.

Other than a lot of detail there isn’t much new here to people who stay up to date with political news, but it does really show what an ego-centric animal Trump was, and I guess with his background it could be expected. The epilogue of the book had an interview with him back at his Mar-a-Lago club, being treated like a king and having Republican politicians and Fox News stars coming to kiss his ring. I think he is comfortable in his self-made reality bubble, and hopefully that’s where he’ll remain.

I’m continuing to read Snow Child, and after that I’ll see what my next book will be.