Standard disclaimer[1]

To no-one’s surprise at all, this novel by Roth tells the story of a senior literature professor. His name is David Kepesh, but that doesn’t really matter. This is, apparently, the third in a series that started with The Breast. At least Roth is dead-honest about what he considers to be the most worthy literary subject of all time. It’s really hard not to feel that this is autobiographical to some degree.

A Cuban-American named Consuela Castillo is taken one of his courses... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the fourth book in The Expanse series. It follows the Rocinante to a planet called Ilus (colonists) or New Terra (U.N.). The Roci is sent there by Avasarala and Fred Johnson to settle the dispute between colonists and the official science and security team sent by the U.N.

Basia Merton is a colonist, there with his wife Lucia, the colony’s doctor and their daughter Felcia. The colonists are mainly Belters, who arrived on the Barbapiccola. They’d managed to convert... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This book argues that the paucity of good jobs these days is due not to a rise in automation, but to a massive decrease in manufacturing output. That is, slow growth rates coupled with a system-wide overcapacity are a much better fit for explaining how we got to where we are today: economies in the west with ostensibly very low unemployment, but largely in the service industry with a much different benefits structure than past jobs.

Benanav sees a UBI as a means to an end,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the seventh novel in The Expanse series. It picks up the story nearly three decades after the end of the last book. The Transport Union manages traffic between the Ring Colonies, led by Camina Drummer. She is comfortable in her role, but laments the hidebound nature of bureaucracy.

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a 114-page document about various features of processor architectures and of programming languages and techniques that affect performance. It starts with a discussion of how memory (RAM or cache) even works, on an electrical level. How much maintenance overhead does a capacitor in a memory unit need in order to maintain its value? That is, there are cycles during which the RAM is refreshing its capacitance and cannot be read. If a processor request for that data... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the third book of the The Expanse series. It tells the story of humanity’s first interactions with The Ring, an alien artifact constructed by the protomolecule on Venus and launched into orbit out near Uranus. The Ring is guarded by a coalition of Belter, Martian, and Earther forces, preventing anyone from approaching it until it can be investigated more thoroughly.

A young Belter takes his tiny “slingshot” ship on a mad ride out to The Ring and manages to shoot by... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

The second book of the The Expanse begins on Ganymede, where we meet Prax Meng, a botanist of consummate skill and education. He has a daughter Mei with a debilitating but controllable disease. She is kidnapped from her pre-school. We also meet Bobbie Draper, a Martian Marine deployed on the surface, opposing the Earth forces that are also stationed there. Tensions are already high when a mysterious humanoid without a spacesuit tears across the surface, eliminating the... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is a short book about the digital advertising business, including its history, its present, and possible futures. The history is that the advertising business has always struggled with the essential fact that they are selling a largely unquantifiable product. There are feelings about the effectiveness of advertising, but little evidence for the effectiveness of a particular ad. Effectiveness is measured in two ways: directly contributing to a sale (e.g. rebates, sales,... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

A girl named Cara lives on a planet named Laconia with her parents, who are part of a research team. Laconia is one of the 1300 ring worlds discovered by humanity in The Expanse novels. Cara enjoys visiting a local pond, where she watches the strange and alien local fauna, in particular the sunbirds. At twilight, “strange dogs” show up, but seem to pose no risk.

One day, Cara feeds a bit of her own food to a sunbird. She saw someone do something similar with a duck in a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This story takes place after Caliban’s War, when Bobbie returns to Mars after having retired from the Mars Marines.

She’s living with her brother and his family. Her nephew David is a gifted student, enrolled in the terraforming program at school. He’s also a gifted chemist, so he’s tempted to make extra money by creating drugs for a local dealer. This is the Breaking Bad storyline, I guess. David is infatuated with LeeLee, one of the girls who orbits the leader of the... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Janie Crawford returns to the village where she has a home, crossing past the hooting and hollering peanut gallery stationed outside the town store. She continues onward, ignoring them, to visit her friend Pheoby, who’d stood by her all the time she’d been gone and who was dying to know what had happened since she’d left.

The rest of the book is Janie recounting the story of her life that led to her, at about forty years old, sitting on that porch with her friend Pheoby.
... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Andy Weir manages to comes up with consistently interesting science-fiction ideas and entertaining yarns (even if it’s rather obvious in some places where he’s almost writing a screenplay). I really wish he would find a co-author to help him smooth out some of the more YA aspects of his writing. Still, this was a fun book to read—after the first third.

As with The Martian, it took me about that long to either get used to the writing style or for Weir to settle in and... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. This is Amos Burton’s origin story. It tells the story of how he started as a young thug named Timmy, in the employ of Baltimore crime lord Amos Burton. He ends up running protection for an identity-grifter named Erich who works for Burton. Timmy lives with Lydia, an older woman who rescued him after his mother had died. She also had worked for Amos Burton, as a... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the first book of the Expanse series. The crew of the ice-hauler Canterbury includes Earther XO Jim Holden, Belter Chief Engineer Naomi Nagata, Martian Navy pilot Alex Kamal, and Earther engineer Amos Burton. While they are on an excursion to investigate a distress call from the ship Scopuli, a stealth ship appears and destroys the Canterbury.

Holden establishes his reputation by broadcasting his suspicions of it having been a Martian attack to the whole solar... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is one of the earliest stories in the entire Expanse universe. It takes place before even Leviathan Wakes. This is Fred Johnson’s origin story. It tells the story of how he started as an Earth marine and how he came to be known as the eponymous butcher.

The present-day Fred Johnson has been taken captive by Anderson Dawes, then-leader of the OPA. But Fred Johnson hasn’t been captured because he’s a danger to the OPA. Quite the contrary: Johnson has become a drunk and... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This novel felt a bit like others I’ve read about tenured professors in America, like Roth’s The Dying Animal. It’s not got much of a plot to speak of. Instead, it’s more a set of character studies of Jack Gladney and his odd family: Babette (his third wife, I believe) and a mix of his and her children, Heinrich, Denise, Steffie, and Wilder. There are other children and their mothers (Jack’s exes) scattered around the country, who make rare appearances. Jack teaches Hitler... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in.

This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.

Bethlehem, NC... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.[1]

Bad... [More]

This is the latest roundup of book titles that my Kindle shows me when I’m not reading it. Long ago, I considered paying to turn off this advertising, but it’s proven to be so entertaining that I’m happy I never gave in and did it. This is a view into what people are reading or what Amazon would like people to be reading or … whatever. I simply observe and catalog. I also sometimes have to hide my Kindle in public places so that no-one calls the police for what they think I’m reading.[1]

Chunkee... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Since my Kindle regularly provides me with what I consider to be bizarre recommendations, I’ll just name this series of posts about them.

Though these books aren’t for me, I’m honestly glad that people are reading books. I am a bit worried that they’re reading books generated by an AI, but as long as they’re happy…

As for these books? I feel like I’m watching the awakening of an a digital mind, trained on and simultaneously stunted by the questionable quality of human literary achievement... [More]

I received a whole pile of late 80s–early 90s comic books from my Aunt Penny, who used to run a newsstand in Mohawk, New York. She’d kept them for years and finally gave them to me for Christmas after seeing me read Le Transpierceneige on my laptop in the back of the minivan as Kath drove us around Switzerland in the fall of 2019.

She gave me the following comics:

• DC: Batman #429: A Death in the Family Part 4
• DC: Batman: A Death in the Family (books 1-4)
• DC: Batman vs. Predator (1 of 3)... [More]

This year’s list of books and reviews and notes got a little bit out of hand (last year also did). As I’ve done in other years, I’ve included my notes and review of each book in this article as well as linked a separate article which includes the same notes and review, as well as citations and rough notes. So, this article weighs in at about 87 pages.

I only hit 21 titles this years, but many of them were meaty tomes, one in German and one in French. A lot of public-policy books this year,... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]

I recently learned that a young reader I know is a fan of The City of Ember (Wikipedia), which is a science-fiction novel “[…] about Ember, a post-apocalyptic underground city threatened by aging infrastructure and corruption.” I heard she’d received the The People of Sparks (Wikipedia) as a gift and was intrigued to learn that she was reading books deemed “science fiction”.

I dug back through my own lists of recent years to find the following recommendations for (more or less) age- and reading-level appropriate... [More]

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an... [More]