I got Liars and Outliers signed, for cheap, direct from Bruce Schneier on the condition that I write a review of it. He sold 100 of them this way as a pretty clever way to stir up some publicity. It also worked as a motivator for me to actually write about it. The basic gist […]
Who Fears Death, like so many of my newer sci-fi or fantasy novels, came to me via Boing Boing. It almost pains me to admit it, but I kept pushing it back on my to-read pile for the same reasons it turned out to be fantastic: I wasn’t sure how much I would enjoy or […]
So I’ve clearly fallen off the wagon of “write something about every book I read,” but I feel like this one requires a small brain dump. For a little backstory, when I was first getting into actual literature, I couldn’t get enough Stephen King books. This was middle-school era, sometime around 1993. When one of […]
So far, I’m somewhat iffy on The Screwtape Letters.  Lewis continues to put Christianity in the position of absolutely logically coherent, and claims that disbelief is based solely on emotion. That is a hard hurdle to jump if I am the audience, but he manages at points to at least be interesting. In particular, when talking about the […]
I just started reading Shop Class as Soulcraft, and I’m already a fan. Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I suddenly don’t feel tired, even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day. Through the portal […]
Still shirking my plan to write something about The Mythical Man-Month, I want to get out a few quick thoughts on Packing for Mars. Â First and foremost, it makes me sad that I will, very likely, never make it to space. Â I got hit with that gut-wrenching realization about two-thirds of the way through the […]
I’ve been slacking on this review thing, but it’s time to play catch up. I’m going to be going slightly out of order, hitting up The Hunger Games series before I go back to The Mythical Man-Month. The second is much easier to go back and reference at a later date, so I’d like to […]
See my intro. The Hunger Games starts off in a dystopian future where much of the world is decimated by… something. One of the strengths here is that the author doesn’t go out of her way to explain things that really don’t matter. Leaving some things to the imagination is a plus, especially in a […]
See my intro and Part 1. Let me begin by emphasizing that I read Catching Fire in one day. I started it Friday morning on my commute, read it there and on my commute home, and the spent hours (after deciding to go to bed earlier) reading it through to completion. It’s my favorite of […]
See my intro, Part 1, and Part 2. I consider Mockingjay the weakest of the three books, but when you open up a world, there’s only so much wrap-up that can be done.  It didn’t grip me nearly as much as the first two, and the final conclusion just felt rushed.  The rushed feeling also showed up at the […]
