Category: Review

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Review

“The Fifth Risk”

Michael Lewis

It took me a bit to realize that this was a reread—I thought that I’d just read some of the marketing materials when the book first came out, maybe an excerpt, but no—by the time I got to the end of the book and it continued to feel familiar, I had to admit that I’d read it before and just missed marking it as read in my big list o’ books.

Still, it holds up well! Honestly, I think it’s almost more interesting now, during the Biden administration, than it was during the Trump years. Sure, it felt more urgent when these things were being actively undermined, but now, it works well as a reminder that our institutions are still fragile. Just because everything is alright in this moment doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels. Hanford’s still got about 100 years and $100 billion in work necessary to clean it up; publicly-funded databases are still one executive order away from being inaccessible to the public that funded them. The core function of government is to handle these big problems, the things that business incentives just don’t work for.

Given the subject matter, it feels like this book would be a tome, something that’ll take you ages to work through. In fact, it’s quite short and easy to read—and, in a way, reminds me of some of McPhee’s stuff. It’s an exploration of the huge, banal things that the US government does every day to keep the world turning.

Overall, it’s an interesting read, and not a huge time investment. I heartily recommend it; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Unseen Academicals”

Terry Pratchett

Taking a break from my reading new books to reread a favorite of mine! Some friends of mine took part in a recreational soccer league recently, and watching their games put me in the mood for Unseen Academicals. And, upon finishing the reread, I was surprised to find that I’d never posted a review of it.

As with everything Pratchett wrote, the book is a delight to read, a perfect blend of serious story and characters with comedy. It is, frankly, utterly unsurprising that he was awarded a knighthood for his writing; it’d be a shame if he hadn’t been honored.

The thing that makes Unseen Academicals such a long-standing favorite for me is Nutt. And now, in reading it again, there’s a part of me that doesn’t like how neatly his arc is tied together in the end. It’s hardly realistic—that degree of anxiety doesn’t just go away like that. But then, it’s a work of fiction, and more importantly, it’s telling a story. A story has to have a neat ending, or it won’t feel complete.

Still, though, I’ve always loved the portrayal of his fighting through it. The Sisyphean struggle to be worthy:

“But he makes wonderful candles,” she added quickly. “He’s always making things. It’s as if… worth is something that drains away all the time so you have to keep topping it up.”

I really can’t say how much I adore this book. I’ve given copies of it to people before, and likely will again. Go read it.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Willpower Instinct”

Kelly McGonigal

The organization of this book felt a bit weird, but I think that was more of an ebook implementation detail than anything to do with the actual content. And, overall, I thought it was interesting—I even jotted down notes in a couple places, interesting ideas that could be useful to apply.

Sitting here writing this, though, I take issue with the title. It doesn’t feel like it fits with the content; there’s no instinct to willpower discussed, really, just things about the evolutionary psychology of the concept of willpower. Can you call something an instinct if you’re specifically writing a book about how to train yourself to have it? Is my ability to type on this keyboard instinctual after the years of practice, or is it robust muscle memory? I’m firmly on the side of the latter.

That aside, some interesting tips from the book:

  • While meditating, focus on the sensation of breathing. And, importantly: The point of meditation is being bad at it. The goal isn’t to think about nothing but your breath; the goal is to practice drawing your focus back to your breath after it shifts elsewhere, and notice those shifts happening.
  • Slowing your breathing to the range of 4-6 breaths per minute, without holding your breath, can help increase your heart rate variability. Heart rate variability may or may not correlate directly with your available willpower.
  • When considering short- versus long-term benefits, loss aversion tends to bite us—setting aside the short-term gain in favor of the long-term one feels like a loss of the short-term gain, even though neither one actually exists yet. You can make this work in your favor, though: examine the long-term gain first, and focus on the short-term option as “why would I give up the long-term thing for this?”
  • It is impossible to Not Think About something. (“Don’t think about white bears” was the experiment the book cited.) The general concept is called “ironic rebound”—you try not to think about it, and think about it even more. Instead, notice the thought, give yourself permission to think it… and then move on.

There were, of course, a few other useful little concepts like that, but those were the ones that most caught my interest. Beyond that, the book did the usual pop psychology book thing, repeating the same point over and over with a variety of stories and angles. While I grasp that it’s a good teaching technique, I do sometimes wish I could get the 4-page pamphlet version instead of the couple-hundred-pages edition. But then, that requires picking out the right example each time, and the trick is in knowing which one that is for each individual reader.

Overall, I liked the book; it was interesting to read some of the psychology of focus and willpower. If you’re interested in that kind of thing—or just want some tips for kicking a bad habit—check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“My Evil Mother”

Margaret Atwood

I was expecting something a lot more depressing, given Atwood’s most famous work, but this was actually quite touching. It’s a very short read, and as far as I can tell, free in Kindle edition, so go ahead and grab it.

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Review

“Global Catastrophic Risks”

Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković

I’d love to see an updated version of this book, because some of the chapters held up really well, a couple need some revised timeline estimates,1 and a couple would be heavily revised in light of how the last couple years have gone.2

The gist of it is, there’s a category of potential problem that can bring human civilization to its knees… or wipe out all life on earth. Some of them, we’re working on; some, we’re powerless to stop; and some, we’re actively making worse.

After establishing that core concept, the book splits up; each chapter is by a different author or authors, and they each address their own area of expertise. A volcanologist addresses the possibility of a super volcano eruption; an astrophysicist talks about the likelihood of gamma ray or cosmic ray bursts.3

Being the kind of person that I am, there wasn’t actually much in this book that was a new concept to me. This is the kind of thing I think about all the time! And so, given that background, it was a surprisingly uplifting book. Aside from the “the universe decided there isn’t life on earth anymore” type issues, every chapter came with advice on how to prevent or mitigate the issues, and discussion of who’s already working on it.

None of the problems discussed are solved, or anywhere near. I’d say that the one that’s currently in best shape is either naturally-occurring pandemics or nuclear proliferation—we have reasonably robust institutions, within the UN, working on those. Building a nuke is frighteningly easy, but getting the raw materials is, fortunately, very difficult. New diseases keep cropping up, but we’re getting reasonably good at developing vaccines, and things with sufficient lethality to totally collapse human civilization kill to fast to spread that well.

The other issues, though? Well… they remain a work in progress. AI researchers are still playing with fire, and CRISPR CAS-9 has made the possibility of engineered pandemics terrifyingly real.

All told, I’d call this book “required reading for anyone working at the UN.” And every world leader. It’s a long read, but the chapter divisions make it fairly digestible; I do recommend it, though with a caveat of “maybe not if you’ve been suffering from anxiety.” It… isn’t likely to help with that, unless you, like me, are already anxious about all these things. Give it a go.4

  1. I can report that we didn’t crack self-replicating nanotechnology by 2020, for example. ↩
  2. Although, actually, the one on dealing with pandemics was pretty much spot-on for what should have been done; the revised version would probably include a lot more pointing at our new historical counter-examples. ↩
  3. The latter being, by my standard, among the scariest concepts in the book. No way to see it coming, and nothing we can do about it regardless. To borrow a term, it’s an out-of-context problem. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Palaces for the People”

Eric Klinenberg

This book felt so familiar throughout that I had to check, several times, if I’d read it before. Evidently I haven’t! Which, I suppose, tells me that I’m more of a hobbyist civil engineer than I thought.

The very quick summary of the book is that, along with everything we usually think of as infrastructure, the US has also severely underinvested in social infrastructure—the things that make it easy for people to connect with one another in a space. The shining example of this, and the titular palaces for the people, are libraries: a completely free, completely public place where people are given the freedom to explore whatever may interest them.

For me, the familiarity of the book was a negative; I didn’t get much at all new from it, and so feel like it wasn’t a great use of my time to read. Conversely, though, if you haven’t spent a bunch of your spare time learning about this kind of thing, it’s probably a very good introduction to the topic. With that in mind, it’s an interesting read; give it a go—or, y’know, check it out from your local library.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories”

A.C. Wise

I continue to like short story collections and anthologies, because there’s less of a sense of obligation to them. In this case, I probably only read 2/3 of the stories—a fair few just didn’t stick as I was starting them, and I thought, oh well, it’s just a few pages to skim past.

Wise’s writing style is distinctly more poetic in character than I tend to go for, and I think that was a lot of what lead me to skip as many of the stories as I did. At least as I was reading, I wasn’t in the headspace to be putting quite that much effort in; maybe this was the wrong book for the moment, but it’s the one I was reading, so.

Even the ones I did read don’t felt like they stuck to my mind super well.1

I did like the note it ended on, though—a weird little high school love story mashed up with a horror movie in a fun way. And it successfully got a song stuck in my head, so that’s something!

At the end, I don’t know that I’d give this book my usual highly-positive “go read it” review; maybe see if your local library has it and come to your own decision?

  1. Admittedly, part of that may be because I finished reading this book after going for a swim, and my brain feels like it’s about 35% chlorine at the moment. ↩
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Review

“H.I.V.E.”

Mark Walden

I started reading this series when I was the actual target age group for it, and sometime in the last few months it popped back into my head. From there, I found out that the final book in the series had been published, and I figured I’d go back through and reread the whole thing, now that it was done, see what it’s like.

Honestly, it stands up pretty well. I still feel like this could be adapted into a movie franchise pretty well—it’s got some of that Harry Potter vibe to it, but for the people who love James Bond rather than people who like general fantasy novel stuff.

What’s nice about the ‘finished series’ part of it is that I feel like most of the plot threads got pulled together very well. Everyone gets closure, everyone you like gets a happy ending. And there’s enough room in the state of things for there to be a spin-off series afterwards, if the author feels like writing more!1

As far as what the series is actually about goes, here’s the tl;dr: the Higher Institute of Villainous Education is a boarding school with a very selective, and mandatory, acceptance rate. From the villainous children of the world, the worst of the worst find themselves snatched up and brought to a sprawling facility carved out of the inside of an active volcano, and taught to be not just better villains, but villains with panache. This is where all the classic Bond villains went to school; there are class sessions on space station logistics, how to choose between sites for your underwater base, and how to effectively monologue while slowly executing the hero.

This series is just fun. It perfectly captures that stylistic aplomb, the undeniable cool of the bad guys in the classic Bond films, and mixes it with the staples of the YA genre better than the “young Bond” series ever managed to.

I wasn’t sure how this reread was going to go, but I’m delighted with the end result. I absolutely recommend these books—at very least, check out the first one and see what you think.2

  1. And, by the way, if Walden ever sees this: give me a sequel about Nigel and Franz falling in love, damn you. That little line in the epilogue, “it’s not just the ladies,” that’s the bare minimum of queer representation possible, and I want more. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Final Hours of Portal 2”

Geoff Keighley

Another one for the ‘short reads’ category!1

Portal 2 is an iconic game, and I’ve spent many, many hours happily playing it with friends. It was cool to get a bit of visibility into the process of making it, and to hear about what Valve is like on the inside. (Very, very different from anything I’m used to, is the moral of the story.)

If you’re interested in video game history, check it out.2

  1. Which I don’t actually have on this site, but maybe I should. On the other hand, going back through hundreds of these book reviews and adding more metadata doesn’t sound particularly fun, so I think I’ll leave it. ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base”

Annie Jacobsen

Structurally, I think the only descriptor I can come up with for this book is “inverse shit-sandwich.” Which is a disgusting mental image, but it fits—the first and last chapter of the book don’t fit with the rest of it, and are undoubtedly the worst parts. They make for an interesting conspiracy theory, and the first chapter actually sticks mostly into the realm of believability, but the last chapter comes back, swipes away that believability, and tacks on a whole lot more conspiracy theory energy. She had one source—who may well have been messing with her—and upon finding that it was impossible to verify anything he told her, instead of throwing it out or putting it in a single chapter with some very big caveats wrapping around it, she went “well, this’ll work as a hook” and made it the start and end of the book.

With all that said, it’s the inverse shit sandwich for a reason—everything else in the book is well-researched, well-cited, and absolutely fascinating to read. So perfectly up my alley, as I just love these histories of the completely wild things going on during the Cold War. The sheer amount of UFO sightings, and conspiracy theories, that came about because the CIA was testing spy aircraft out in the desert is just incredible. And the storytelling as she leads the reader to the reveal that the CIA was leaning in to the UFO theories because it kept people from trying to figure out what was actually happening? Impeccable.

There’s also some great stories from the larger Nevada test site. I had a great moment of realizing that the NERVA research being done involved a whole lot of underground facility—that kind of thing immediately makes me want to go explore an abandoned research site!1 And, beyond that, there’s a great story of someone who invented a whole new level of screwup.

So, set the scene. It’s 1980something, and today’s the day of a nuclear test, with another one coming up in a few days—meaning, there’s a live nuclear warhead, and materials to assemble at least one more, on-site at the Nevada test site. You’re a security contractor for the Department of Energy, and you’re going to do a penetration test of the security at the site—take a helicopter and a couple guys with guns full of rubber bullets, and see how well they’re able to handle it. But first, pop quiz, what’s step zero of a security test like that?

If you answered “call the Department of Energy and let them know you’re doing a security test,” congratulations, you’re smarter than the people who actually did the test that day.

And, as I was reading this story, my thought was “wow, this is a whole new level of screwup I can aspire never to achieve—‘they had to scramble fighter jets about me’”

Except, as I found a page later, I was wrong. It was worse than that—the phone tree made it to the White House, who put the Navy on alert—Tomahawk missiles targeted at the site. Which, all told, is actually quite sensible, in an obscene way: there’s already a nuclear test scheduled, so it’s nearly evacuated. If the Mystery Bad Guys manage to take the nuke-and-a-half that’s there, well, the people on-site are already dead. And “the Mystery Bad Guys have a nuke or two” is pretty much the end of the How Bad Can It Get scale. So, here we are with the actual brand new level of screwup: “the White House decided the best option for containing what I did was a nuclear strike.”

Yikes.

So, seriously, with the weirdness of the first and last chapters aside, this book was really, really good, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I heartily recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. That said, it would be an Extremely Bad Idea! Firstly, it was full of spiders when it was being actively maintained, so it’s probably not gotten less full of spiders since then. Second, it’s officially decommission and was, y’know, a tunnel under a mountain, so it’s very possible it’s caved in. Thirdly, it’s smack dab in the middle of the Department of Energy’s test site, which means if you actually get they’re you’re technically either a terrorist or doing a treason, just by being there. And fourthly, it was the site of two distinct nuclear reactor meltdowns, so it’s not exactly the healthiest of environments. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Signal Moon”

Kate Quinn

This is one of those stories that, going in, you know is going to hurt. Voice-only time travel does not a happy ending make, especially across 80 years. But it’s still worth reading—it’s quite short and to the point, and very effectively told. Spend an hour being sad.1

  1. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses”

Diane Duane

I picked this up for a reread as a break from my “read all the ebooks I’ve got” project, and upon finishing it was surprised to find that I’d never written a review. Well, no time like the present to correct that!

In short, I adore this book. It’s a truly wonderful piece of alternate-history fiction, and the way that’s expressed is done so very perfectly. I’ve got the revised edition, which includes at the end some of the author’s notes about the differences between the worlds it takes place in and ours—and yes, worlds, plural, one of the divergences is the discovery of interdimensional travel, but it’s clearly stated that we’re due to figure that out soon. But even without that, it feels like if you were given the chance to ask Duane about anything in here, pull at any of the strings, she’d have a bunch of notes already prepared. My favorite moment of this is a couple words in passing, where the characters are finally shocked enough by something to say it full out, and suddenly their previous swear of “Suz!” makes more sense: “Suzanne H. Christ!”

Beyond that, the story is weird and fun, and the whole ‘mix of universes’ thing, with the politics that comes from having all these different timelines coming together, makes for a fascinating setting. And, of course, I absolutely love any book that showcases great friendships, and doesn’t fall over itself trying to shoehorn in a love story.1

Overall, this book is a delight, and I heartily recommend it. Pick it up directly from the author’s ebook store, and browse around while you’re there—I love everything of hers that I’ve ever read.2

  1. It was, apparently, a common complaint with the earlier edition that the cover art and title made it sound like a romance novel; I assure you, a romance novel it is not. You’re welcome to read it as if it is one, though, and I bet you’ll find your expectations subverted in a very fun way! ↩
  2. Citation: I’ve got a quote from one of her books as a tattoo. ↩
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Review

PDFs, Various

I’ve been working my way through the big pile of ebooks I own, and recently—ahead of the delivery of a new ereader—decided it’d behoove me to go through all the ones that I’ve only got in PDF form. It’s a fun pile, because I have no idea where I got most of these, but that’s the story for a great deal of my ebook library. I spent college on the mailing lists of several websites that would do charity ebook sales, and I’m the kind of person who’s rather unable to resist that kind of thing, so it’s unsurprising that, after over a year of making a concerted effort to read through that backlog, I’m down to only a couple hundred books left.

Most of those ebooks I’ve got as various ereader-compatible formats, because, books, duh. A few, though, were determinedly available only as PDF—things that had a lot of visuals and hand-laid-out pages that tend to get, at best, rumpled up by the conversion to epub. None of them felt quite right for a full review on their own, but having gone through the pile, I feel like I should at least mention them here.

“Sushi at Home: A Mat-to-Table Sushi Cookbook”

I remain utterly unconvinced on the concept of sashimi, and am not likely to actually take up sushi-making, but learning the history was interesting. I’m also feeling a bit more open to the idea of trying sushi again for the first time in several years; now that I’ve got somewhat more of an idea of what things are, I’m hoping I’ll be able to better-select the things to try that I have a chance of liking.

“Real BBQ” – Will Budiaman

Similar structure to the sushi book, being primarily recipes that I skimmed over, but the first couple chapters on the history and general techniques of barbecue were interesting, and there’s a few tips in here that I hadn’t seen before. A useful read, if you’re in a skimming mood!

“Handcrafted Bitters” – Will Budiaman

Only now, in writing this review, do I notice these two are the same author. Probably got them at the same time, then!

Same structure, some overview and techniques and then many recipes. More of a disconnect than the sushi book for me, given that I don’t drink, but again, interesting to read the history and see at least a little bit of what this thing is about. I do like having enough background knowledge on a topic to at least ask interesting questions, and I feel like this got me there.

“Hallucinogenic Plants” – Richard Evans Schultes

This was actually the first of these four that I read; I ended with BBQ, and joked that I’d been in a sequence of three books on topics I have no intention of ever getting much involved in.

Beautifully illustrated, and kinda reminded me of John McPhee at times. An interesting read, although I spent a lot of it wondering how, exactly, the various cultures involved figured these things out. I guess before the invention of writing, “licking random plants to see what would happen” may have been a pretty good form of entertainment?

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Review

“The Citizen’s Guide to Climate Success”

Mark Jaccard

The intro to this book does a good job of explaining what the whole book is going to do: go through some common climate beliefs and prove them wrong. And not in a single direction, either—sure, there’s the usual “anthropogenic climate change is a theory in the same way that gravity is” thing, but there’s also some good deconstruction of a couple of my personal pet theories. Which is for the best: when it comes to the climate emergency, being able to look at the evidence and change your opinion as necessary is pretty important!

I don’t actually have a great deal to say about this book; it was useful to read, and I appreciate that it came with some clear action items. (tl;dr: push for politicians to put in climate regulations; bonus points for flexibility in implementation, extra bonus points for handing power to regulatory agencies a la California’s Air Resources Board)

So hey, give it a read! As an extra push, the PDF version is free to download, so all it costs you is the time.

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Review

“Venom and Vanilla”

Shannon Mayer

I picked this at random out of the pile of unread books on my Kindle, and it lined up oddly well with the last book I read, though in a way that gave me mental whiplash. Where Song of Achilles was a powerful and emotional read, Venom and Vanilla was just kinda silly and fun. It feels like an action-adventure novel written in the style of a pulp-paperback romance.

I found the protagonist a bit irritating at times—her background was “escaped from a religious cult,” and I do get that part of the story arc for her is meant to be getting over the leftover indoctrination from that. Except the escape part happened like a decade gone, and the interim, she was a small business owner in Seattle; there’s a certain amount of naïveté that I just can’t really believe someone would hold on to through that.

Similarly, the worldbuilding has a lot of characteristics that remind me of Teen Wolf fanfiction. It’s an interesting concept, and fun to play around in, but if you try to examine it closely, it gets really hard to figure out the intervening steps between “the world as it really was 20 years ago” and “the world as it is in this book, having had One Big Thing change.” Do I believe that the reveal of the existence of supernatural creatures would trigger massive waves of xenophobia, especially in the US? Yes! No suspension of disbelief required. Do I believe that we’d then built a 40-foot concrete wall the entire length of the US-Canada border, move all the humans out of Canada, and start dumping every supernatural we could find onto the Canadian side? No, sorry, I’m actually not capable of suspending my disbelief enough to get past the idea of the US Congress trying to sell that concept to the average Québécois. Much less the Canadian Parliament as a whole.

For my overall opinion, I’m calling back to the first paragraph I wrote: it’s silly and fun. I don’t know that I’d recommend actually spending money on this, but you could maybe find a copy in the library and give it a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩