Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the last of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. It picks up where the first two books left off: the rescue of Jimmy and Amanda from the clutches of the two Painballers. Ren and Toby lead everyone home, back to the compound where they’ve set up camp with the Crakers. Soon, they are joined by Zeb, who takes up with Toby, despite her misgivings that he will take up with the slutty Swift Fox.

Despite the high level of education for most of the members of this last... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

The Boys is a story about a world with super-powered beings (“supes”). This is not unusual for comic books, or graphic novels. The distinction is that this story doesn’t make a distinction between superheroes and supervillains. It doesn’t believe that superheroes exist. Or it grudgingly concedes that some super-powered beings seem not to take advantage of their powers for personal gain. The only example of a high-level super-powered being who does so is Annie.

The story... [More]

Since the list of books and reviews and notes for the last couple of years got a little bit out of hand, I’ve only included partial notes and review of each book in this article. This year, the separate article for each book generally includes many more notes and review material, as well as citations and rough notes.

Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur (1907)

by Maurice Leblanc

This is a collection of stories about Arsène Lupin, a gentleman thief.

• L’Arrestation d’Arsène Lupin: Lupin... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

Eva Grjdic works at Cosmos, a grocery-store chain à la Migros.

The art style reminds me very much of my well-worn and beloved Mad magazines that I spent my youth reading. It is, perhaps, closest to Mort Drucker, with a bit of Sergio Aragones mixed in. The text is brilliant. It’s subversive, it’s so very Swiss. The context is so very Swiss. You won’t be able to really get this comic unless you live here or lived her at that time.

Eva is dirt poor and barely makes ends... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the second of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. The events in this book cover the same time frame as the first novel, but from the points of view of different characters. In that novel, we read about a girl named Bernice that Jimmy knew at the Martha-Graham Academy they both attended. She was a God’s Gardener. In this book, we learn more about her and much more about the Gardeners.

The mythology of the Gardeners is quite scientific. They are highly... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the first of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. This one tells the story of Snowman, a lone, somewhat mad, man living on his own in a post-apocalyptic world, nearly bereft of other human life. The only other “people” around are a tribe of pleasant, but simple humanoids that Snowman calls Crakers.

Snowman remembers a time when there were more people than just the Crakers. He remembers a time when the planet was controlled by supra-national corporations that ran... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the sixth book of the The Expanse series. It starts with Marco Inaros and his Free Navy in charge of the Slow Zone and Medina Station in it. Michio Pa is at the heart of the small group of higher-ups in the Free Navy who are beginning to seriously doubt Marco’s qualifications and goals. Those goals always seem to change whenever Marco would have had to admit that he’d failed. He managed to destroy billions on Earth, but the blow strikes simultaneously at Belters... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the fifth book of the The Expanse series. The book starts with a Belter raid on a Martian base on Callisto. A 15-year-old named Filip leads the raid. He is forced to leave a man behind, but the mission is otherwise a success. They’d managed to capture the stealth shielding from the Martians and made it look like a botched raid on a different warehouse.

The Rocinante is back at Tycho Station, this time for a half-year of repairs and upgrades. Amos heads to Earth to... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This story takes place after Abaddon’s Gate. It tells the story of Paulo Cortázar, who started life as a somewhat gifted, but lazy student. He gets hooked on amphetamines during his latter years at university and manages to get his degree. He has some money set aside, but he also now has a pretty big monkey on his back. He seems to be chronically incapable of landing a job, so he sets up his apartment for a cleansing—he’s going to kick the drug habit that he, in a... [More]

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]