Category: Review

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Review

“A City on Mars”

Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith

The Weinersmiths once again knock it out of the park; they’re truly some of the best pop-science writers out there.

A City on Mars is an overview of, basically, the entire concept of “can and should we be trying to colonize Mars?” And, unlike the many, many blog posts out there where people say “yes!” and then excitedly talk about the Sabatier reaction, they spend a lot more time talking about the very real challenges. And, yes, a lot of that is the scientific — rockets are big, expensive, complicated machines! Biology is weird and we have literally no idea what happens to people if they spend as much time in microgravity as would be necessary to get to Mars, much less the amount of time they’d spend living in the lower-gravity environment of Mars (or the moon).1 But what this book touches on that I think a lot of other media on the subject ignores is the law. Like, we know Elon likes to hand-wave away regulation, and every libertarian fantasizes about living in space where there’s no government, but that’s… not actually how it works?2 Like, if you get filmed committing a murder in international waters, it’s still a murder, and you can and will be prosecuted for it, there’ll just be an awkward phase at the beginning of the trial where your lawyer argues with the prosecution about which specific jurisdiction you’re going to be tried in.

Overall, quite an interesting read; you’ll learn a lot more about international law than you probably know, and it’s a fun book all the way through. Well worth it. Check it out!3

  1. Like, maybe after two consecutive years of living in microgravity, you start aging backwards? It’s not likely, but nobody has checked. More realistically are the questions like “the thing where being in space screws up your eyes, does that keep getting worse over time? Does anything go wrong in your brain if it’s not getting pulled into shape by gravity? Can people even get pregnant in space?” Again, things that nobody has gotten around to testing. Oftentimes for good reason, but still. ↩
  2. Note: I’m writing this in early January of 2025. Elon may yet become god-emperor, in which case, my argument here is partially moot. ↩
  3. 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

“Legends & Lattes”

Travis Baldree

I’d been putting off reading this one because I wasn’t sold on the entire “cozy fantasy” genre. I did actually try reading another one at some point, and it just didn’t click for me — I think it leaned too far into the ‘cozy’, and the result was me spending the entire book on tenterhooks, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it never did. Legends & Lattes didn’t have that issue — there was enough of a story arc, enough narrative tensions, some clear “there’s a Bad Person who Is A Problem” moments that I could settle into the story instead of trying to figure out what I was missing.

I really wasn’t prepared for how well this would grab me; I went down to Powell’s intending to pick up a specific book, saw this on one of the “on sale!” displays, and grabbed it to read the first chapter in the cafe to decide if it was for me. And then suddenly I had finished chapter 18 and I needed to pay for my books and head home.1

“Cozy fantasy” is a very specific genre, and now I’m wondering if there’s a term for the other thing this book did incredibly well and that I absolutely love: that feeling of building something. It’s in the Moist von Lipwig books, it’s in Kitty Cat Kill Sat, heck, it’s what makes Cities Skylines so fun. That feeling that something is being created. It doesn’t have to be something grand; honestly, it’s often better when it isn’t. A coffee shop is the right scale here; it’s something that feels real, that feels concrete. That feels achievable. That is the thing I truly loved about this book.

So, hey, I am thoroughly late to the party, but this was a really wonderful read. Pick up a copy, sit in a coffee shop, and do some reading.2

  1. By the time I got home, I was on chapter 21. Public transit: it’s great! You can read and someone else pays attention to the road so you don’t have to! ↩
  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 Lost Story”

Meg Shaffer

Something like fifty pages in, I had to put the book down and go check the Goodreads page – I just needed to know if it was tagged ‘LGBTQ,’ because if it wasn’t, that would’ve been some She Who Must Not Be Named-level “creating chemistry between two same-sex characters and then resolutely ignoring it to cram in a straight romance,” and I just didn’t have it in me to deal with it. Fortunately, the tag was there, so I could go back to reading, and I’m so glad I did.

This… is a story about stories. The storyteller occasionally pauses the action to speak directly to the reader, and those little pauses are used to great effect. It’s taking the tropes of fairy tales and playing with them, taking the familiar shapes of those stories and asking us what else, what more, what happens in the happily ever after? And what else happened in the unhappily before? What else went on around the fairy tale, to enable the story to go the way it did? What if the story was incomplete?

And the storytelling is, again, excellent; the bulk of the plot was a touch predictable, but the characters were all so fun that I didn’t particularly mind, and that main plot ended far enough before I ran out of book that there was some fun tension in wondering what else was going to happen. The obvious Big Bad was defeated, but… what else?1 What more? Plus, some fun use of literary devices; a lot of this alludes to the Chronicles of Narnia, but I think my favorite “look at me, I remember things from English class!” moment was the realization that, halfway through the book, the flashback to one character’s pillow-talk conversation about wormholes, that had been a Chekhov’s Gun. Absolutely delightful.

Overall, my review is thus: my friend loaned me this book a while ago, and I hadn’t yet gotten to it, but was prompted to move it up the list when someone else asked to borrow her copy. “I can probably get that to you by the next time I see you,” I said, knowing it was a week and change away. I finished my current read during my lunch break on Thursday, got home, cracked open The Lost Story… and finished it Thursday night. And now, as I go to look up the Bookshop link, I’m ordering myself a copy.2 That’s how much I loved this book.

  1. And by “obvious Big Bad” I don’t mean “obviously this Bad Guy was the Big Bad,” I mean “the identity of the Big Bad was obvious,” but again: doesn’t really detract from the story. The mystery wasn’t the key thing, it was just a touch of dramatic tension as the reader figures it out well before the characters. ↩
  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

“Radical Acceptance”

Tara Brach

This was a “wandering around Powell’s” find, and I picked it up, read the first line of the back, and accepted immediately that I was going to buy the book.

“Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book.

Frankly, I didn’t even make it to the end of the sentence; just the quote was striking enough. It is, indeed, a deep and tenacious suffering; it’s something I’ve struggled with a great deal in my life, and keep coming back to, time and again.

For the most part, the book continued in that “this is about you, personally” kind of feeling as I read it. I suppose it is, at bare minimum, somewhat validating to hear that I’m not the only one who falls into these patterns? And it’s hopeful, to read through the standard self-help-book anecdotes about someone who had a problem, and how, with the help of the author, they were able to address it. And, honestly, bonus points for not promising to fix the problem, just address it; if the claim had been “follow these three simple steps and you’ll be cured forever!” I’d be rolling my eyes and tossing the book aside, but it’s willing to admit that the problem will remain. It doesn’t solve the problem, it addresses it; it teaches you ways to manage it, to keep it from overwhelming you, to work through it.

I’ll admit to having drifted off a bit towards the end, where the book started to shift from “meditation and psychology” into “spiritualism and Buddhism,” because I’m not exactly one for spiritualism or religion. But I’m already planning to reread this at some point in the future, so who knows, maybe once I’ve spent some time applying the earlier chapters, I’ll be more receptive to the latter ones?

Anyhow, just for the way it grabbed me, and how effectively it held on, I have to recommend this one. It was well worth the read, and I filled pages and pages of my notebook. Give it a go.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

“A Death at the Dionysus Club”

Melissa Scott & Amy Griswold

It’s been long enough since I read the first book in this series that I remembered basically nothing about the magic system, but I picked it up again well enough over the course of the book.1 Probably would’ve helped to recall how the protagonists’ relationship got started, as well, but I think this one did reasonably well at exploring it that I felt caught up again by the end.

It is, once again, a Holmes-ian story, but in this case I think it has less to do with characters falling into the archetypes and more to do with just being a Victorian-era murder mystery featuring people working with but not for Scotland Yard. I did want to shake the protagonists a bit, because they continually ignored the incredibly obvious suspect—to the point that the should’ve-been-a-suspect, himself, called them out on it.

Overall, though, I found it to be a remarkably fun romp. A good little hint of horror in places, because “the killer is using magic” adds a nice “you can’t see them coming” aspect at times. Worth the read; check it out.2

  1. Long enough ago that I was still doing subtitles on these posts! ↩
  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

“Kitty Cat Kill Sat”

Argus

I loved this book. Struggled with it in a couple places—you can, at times, really tell that it was originally written as serialized fiction. But even those bits of “wait, you forgot about-“ kinda make sense within the world of the story. Lily is a 400-year-old housecat who uplifted herself, the ADHD shouldn’t really be a surprise.

The story arc of this book is a really touching found family kind of thing, which always gets to me to some degree, but where it really shone was in the worldbuilding. I think I understand the Warhammer people a bit better now.

In short, this book is set after the sci-fi. It’s, like, 15,000 years in the future. Civilization has collapsed. Civilization has, in fact, collapsed, rebuilt, risen, and collapsed again, dozens of times over. Lily is an immortal, uplifted cat, who wound up inheriting command of the space station that’s the best of the best, a mostly self-repairing, spectacularly heavily-armed orbital installation. She mostly fills her time by providing close artillery support to the deserving down on Earth, amongst other things like “using a low-powered orbital laser to guide a semi-sentient cloud of mind control chemicals away from population centers.” 15,000 years of sci-fi tech is a lot of time to build horrific weapons, and AIs that go a little nuts, and generally every other sci-fi story arc you can imagine. It’s a little reminiscent of Fine Structure in that way.

So—and this terrible pun is both intended and premeditated—this book is catnip to me. All the sci-fi, and found family? And it’s about a cat? How could I not love it? Please, give it a read.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

“Avatar, the Last Airbender”: Various Comics

Gene Luen Yang, Gurihiru, Michael Heisler Faith Erin Hicks, Bryan Koneitzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Peter Wartman, Adele Matera

This started off as a series of reviews, one-by-one, and then I realized that I was doing each one in very short form, and it felt better as an omnibus post instead. I’ll go ahead and drop my disclaimer here: these are Bookshop affiliate links, so if you buy the book after clicking on them, I’ll get a wee little commission. Less of a commission than your local bookstore gets from each Bookshop purchase, though, because they’ve got their priorities in the right order. Seriously, buy your books with Bookshop, not Amazon.

“Smoke and Shadow”

Skipping around a bit, apparently—it seems that I read the first couple of Avatar comics, but missed the conclusion of Zuko’s search for his mother, so there’s a lot going on here that I wasn’t aware of.

I’m continuing to enjoy the way that these comics expand the series into topics that don’t fit quite as well in the show. In this case, it’s… the invention of domestic terrorism? Yowza.

This one was a weird vibe compared to the Korra comics. An interesting read, sure, but… weird.

“North and South”

Yes, I am in a completionist mood for these comics, why do you ask?

Seems like we’re doing a “the Gaang learns about realpolitik” arc, here? Another round of domestic unrest, in the Southern Water Tribe this time, featuring xenophobia, a Saudi Arabia-level oil find, and a little bit of “what do you mean Hakoda went on a date?” from Katara.

Again, interesting to read, but, boy, this sure is a lot of events going on in not a lot of book.

“Imbalance”

It’s the origin story of Republic City! I really enjoyed this—it’s setting up some of the seeds of what’ll come up in the first season of Legend of Korra, and showing a bit more of how the city developed into what it is by her time. Really enjoyable bit of world-building; check it out.

“The Rift”

Further back into the origin story of Republic City! I’m reading these all sorts of out of order. I like the thought that there’s geological features that came from spirit intervention—in this case, a big ore deposit because a metal-themed spirit made their home in this place. A fun concept.

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Review

“The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire”

Bryan Koneitzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Michelle Wong, Killian Ng

What was I gonna do, not read the next one? Don’t be silly.

This wasn’t quite as queer as Turf Wars, but I did still really enjoy it. Kuvira is a really interesting character, and seeing some of her backstory was super interesting. The redemption arc she was going through felt rushed, honestly, but it is, after all, a graphic novel, so the pacing is different than a prose novel.

I also really enjoyed touching on some of the broader-scale changes taking place in this world. Two geopolitical things going on at once, in overlapping territory: the collapse of what I viewed as a USSR-analogue,12 and the voluntary dissolution of the monarchy in a China-analogue, to be replaced with democratic elections. Both of which are messy, messy things; the fact that they’re happening in the same place makes it even more of a mess. Good luck, everyone!

For bonus points, they also pulled in some dangling threads from the previous series. Yeah, I get that the Gaang was horrified by Long Feng’s mind-control program and tossed it, but… a whole lot of Dai Lee knew how to do that mind-control trick. It was probably written down somewhere, too. That’s an awful lot of temptation for a ruler…

Another great expansion of the Avatar universe; also, absolutely worth the read. Check it out.3

  1. Mostly by dint of “Republic City is clearly a USA-analogue” and “season 4 was about the invention of nuclear weapons.” ↩
  2. Footnote on that footnote: if you think plutonium is unbalanced in our world, spirit weapons are bonkers in this universe. So, you take a certain vine, electrocute it, and then it’s a nuke? That’s all it takes? Oh, don’t worry, the vines can only be found in one giant mystical swamp in the middle of nowhere- oh, wait, they also grow everywhere in Central Park. This is probably fine.
    (The best take I’ve ever seen on this was in Repairs, Retrofits, and Upgrades, which I also recommend as a read.) ↩
  3. 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 Legend of Korra: Turf Wars”

Bryan Koneitzko, Michael Dante DiMartino, Killian Ng, Irene Koh

As this is the comic tie-in to a show I liked, my expectations weren’t exactly sky-high going in. I think the Avatar universe works reasonably well as a comic, but it still feels like it’s losing something of the kinetic energy of the action scenes by not being fully animated.

That said, this story was delightful. I suspect because it’s the comic tie-in, and not The Show itself, it was able to do the sorts of things that corporate overlords tend not to like. In this case, that meant giving more than a meaningful holding of hands and Word Of God to show us that Korra and Asami are lesbians, Harold. And, beyond a cute little first date vacation montage, we got… a genuinely nice coming out arc for Korra with her parents, Kya casually dropping in her own queer history, and then extending on to tell us about the queer history of the Avatar world as a whole.1

Beyond that, there’s just some expansion of the world going on that I greatly enjoyed; a whole campaign cycle, some of the politics of running a city that suddenly has an interdimensional portal in the middle of it, and some gang violence to keep the fight scenes running. This was a lot of fun to read; I highly recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. Short summary: the air nomads are chill as hell, the water tribe is culturally Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the fire nation was fine with it up until—you guessed it—Fire Lord Sozin attacked, and the earth kingdom is… conservative. ↩
  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

“Countdown”

Sarah Scoles

Bumped this up in my reading queue so I could have it done prior to the discussion of my recent book club read, The Curve of Binding Energy. It seemed like it would be a nice accompaniment, and it was—didn’t captivate me with the writing style in the way McPhee does, but it sure tackled the same material from a perspective 40-odd years later. Not an update, per se, but a companion.

I’ve read a fair few books about the nuclear industry, both weapons and civilian, and found this to be a very interesting addition to that set. Because it’s not about the history, really, the way most of those others have been. Sure, there’s some context provided, but it’s mostly interested with what’s going on right now. It’s very clear that, for all our collective willingness to treat nuclear weapons as a problem that ended with the Cold War, they are still very much an ongoing concern. And boy, is that ever a thing to be worried by. Although how much to worry might vary a bit as you read the book, because a lot of the people working in the industry are doing so because they want to make sure it’s safe, that we won’t be facing the nuclear apocalypse.

This was an absolutely fascinating read, and I got through it… not in one sitting, because I started it too late in the day for that, but in the space of 24 hours. Well worth reading; 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

“The Vegan Meat Cookbook”

Miyoko Schinner

This worked surprisingly well as a counterpoint to The Vegetarian Flavor Bible. Where that one went all-in on “there’s so many interesting fruits/vegetables/etc. that you won’t even miss meat,” this is a lot more “so: you miss eating meat, but want to stick with not eating meat.” It’s an interesting approach! It felt weird to be reading through the steps and see “add the chicken” or whatever, and need to look over at the ingredients list and see that it was specifying a couple of different vegetarian “chicken” options.

The introduction covered a long list of meat-imitation products, many of which I hadn’t heard of, and I found it to be a useful resource; I’ve got some notes for next time I’m at the grocery store, to see what’s available. It also had some instructions on making your own meat replacements, which I… don’t think I’ll actually be following. I can’t be bothered to make my own bread, so a vegan ‘chicken’ recipe that seems to be making bread with twice the steps and triple the work isn’t an easy sell for me. Still, it’s useful that it’s there, and I’ll happily keep this on the shelf as reference in case the inspiration ever strikes.

Overall, a neat little cookbook; I took some notes, and bookmarked some recipes, and I think it’ll be a good addition to my little collection. 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

Moist von Lipwig

Terry Pratchett

I never feel quite right about writing a book review of a book that I’d already read before, but sometimes I can bring myself to do it with a series. In this case, it’s a sub-series—the Moist von Lipwig books within Terry Pratchett’s greater Discworld series. I didn’t quite intend to, but wound up rereading all three of them. In reverse order, in fact, which really highlights the “didn’t quite intend to”—had I known that’s what I was doing, I probably would’ve done it in the proper order, but I read the last one and then went “I want a bit more of that,” read the second one, and thought “well, I might as well finish the set.”

It’s not a surprise to me that I love these books, that they’re some of my favorite in the whole series, that I come back to them fairly often. There’s a specific aspect to them that I love: the feeling of building something. Moist, and oh what a name, is a man who works only in words—something I can relate to, being a programmer—and yet these books are three different times that he used that to help build something real. Rebuild the post office, rebuild the banks, and then build the railway.

I never regret reading a Pratchett book. In your case, dear reader, I’d say to actually go from first to last, rather than mixing it all around: start with Going Postal.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 Writing

“Your Idol”

Sounding the spoiler horn: not only will I be making no effort to avoid spoilers for K-Pop Demon Hunters here, I will be actively assuming that the reader has seen the movie.

Continue reading ““Your Idol””
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Review

“Night Sky Mine”

Melissa Scott

I really enjoyed this one! I think it counts as cyberpunk, but the digital world stuff was a really neat take on evolutionary programming. I’m actually over here wondering how much this was an inspiration for Code Lyoko, the visuals I was imagining felt very similar.

The setting is basically that, at some point, software engineers went “screw it, we’ll just evolve software to do what we want instead of trying to write it ourselves.”1 Skip forward a mystery amount of time, and they’ve accidentally created entire ecosystems – pieces of software acting like flora and fauna in a networked environment, preying on one another and, occasionally, going all cancerous and crashing the entire substrate running it all.2

The book takes place a long time after that; there’s entire careers in software breeding now, as well as people who go hunting in the wild parts of the net, looking for useful programs.

My only negative I’ve got is that the pacing feels off; the ebook came in at something like 440 pages, and the denouement hit on, like, page 430. It felt rushed, and like there was closure missing for the characters and the story itself. I suppose that means I need to go see if there’s a sequel.

I also spent the entire book reading the title with the word ‘mine’ meaning ’belonging to me,’ despite the fact that the asteroid-mining megacorporation in the background is named Night Sky Mine Co., but that’s more on me than the book.

Anyhow, I quite enjoyed the read – check it out!3

  1. If this feels familiar, you are correct, that’s what all the modern AI stuff is. ↩
  2. This goes poorly for people relying on other software running on that substrate – for example, navigation and life support systems for faster-than-light starships. ↩
  3. 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

“The Curve of Binding Energy”

John McPhee

Truly astonishing that it took me this long to read this book; it’s thoroughly right up my alley.1 To start with, it’s McPhee, and he’s my favorite nonfiction author. And after that, it’s about nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and proliferation… with a solid digression into nuclear rocketry, which has long been an interest of mine.2 Nothing in the rocketry section was new to me—I’ve read up enough on that to the point that everything was familiar, although the personal story of Taylor, the interviewee, selling Wernher von Braun on the concept wasn’t something I recalled previously.

What was new, and awe-inspiring in a sort of dry-mouthed terror kind of way, was the nuclear weaponry aspect. This is a book about Theodore B. Taylor, one of the world’s greatest experts in the design of atomic weapons. Over the course of the book he does things like, sitting in front of McPhee during an interview, sketch out plans for a low-yield atom bomb that could be built using only commercially-available equipment and products, with the sole exception of the enriched uranium. He does so while carefully using only publicly-available information. And, in the midst of doing it, he describes each likely point in the commercial reactor fuel processing cycle that said fissile materials could be stolen, and exactly what you would need to do to process that form of the material into what you’d need to build a bomb. This book is, in essence, just a little bit short of being an instruction guide on How To Build A Nuke In Your Garage.

Pair that with a series of explorations of nuclear facilities, in-depth review of the various security failings therein, and a memorable anecdote about the time a fourteen-year-old boy came up with credible designs for a hydrogen bomb, and the fact that the we still, nearly 50 years after this book came out, have yet to see a terrorist organization—or just a really motivated whack-job—build their own bomb is, as I said, awe-inspiring in a dry-mouthed terror kind of way. It isn’t nearly as hard as it should be.

That’s really the key point of this whole book, and the thing that kept standing out to me. I had moments of fun dorkiness—laughing aloud about midway through when Taylor, distracted by a thought, started describing his plan to build what we’d today call a hyperloop network. A certain somebody isn’t nearly as inventive as he’d like to pretend he is; this guy was talking about it when you were still in diapers!3

All in all, this book was an absolute delight to read. I’m likely to reread it again in the next month, and only partially because I wound up finishing it with a bit too much lead-time before the actual book club meeting. I just really enjoyed it, and would like to take a second crack at it, this time without the commonplace book beside me to jot down notes. I absolutely recommend the read; check it out.4

  1. It says good things about my devotion to the whole “don’t buy yourself new books until you finish reading all the ones you’ve already bought” plan that I had to sell my book club on reading it so I could sneak it through the “buying books for book club doesn’t count” exception. ↩
  2. I’m a little tempted to publish the essay I wrote in high school about nuclear rocketry, since I dug it up to look at again while reading this, but probably for the best that I don’t. I’m not interested in knowing how bad my writing skills were that long ago. Or, worse, finding out that they’ve decayed. ↩
  3. Admittedly, Not Tony Stark’s approach gets some points for doing tunneling the boring way (ba-dum-tss) instead of through Taylor’s proposed plan of nuclear shaped charges.
    That said, Taylor’s expertise, and the paragraph of explaining how well one actually can shape a nuclear explosion when they’re Theodore Taylor, makes it a more credible plan than when I talk about that kind of concept. ↩
  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. ↩