Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of US Transit by Christof Spieler. Oh I love maps, and this book is chock full of them, and a great overview of transit…
Age of Fracture by Daniel Rodgers. I really really wanted to like this book, it is well-regarded and seems to have an interesting thesis about what has happened in the…
Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn. Excellent detective tale set in a future America devastated by ecological change. The protagonist is an investigator who travels town to town, and finds herself caught…
I just reviewed all my books I read over the last year. Here are the ones that stick with me. Fiction: All Systems Red by Martha Wells. The first in…
Every year we play a couple board games over the holiday season. This year’s winner was Dead of Winter. The combination of collaborative play with individual secret objectives is great…
A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias. Ugh, how did this thing get decent reviews? Reads like Asimov from early 70s which I enjoyed when I was 12 but hasn’t…
Ghettoside by Jill Leovy. In depth story about homicides in the poorer parts of LA. The author makes the strong case that the high rate of crime is a consequence…
Aware by Daniel J. Siegel. A recommended text on meditation, but too much handwavey pseudo science for me. Did not find worthwhile at all, rather found it annoying. Buddha’s Brain…
Waking Up White by Debby Irving. A lot to process in this book. I am probably just a few steps along the path to really understanding race in the US…
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Award winner, and an interesting precept about a future human diaspora to the stars, but oh my gosh did it drag on. Editor please.…
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. Great retelling of the cholera epidemic in 1854 London, and the detective workto find the source. We look back andthe infectious mechanism for cholera…
Origin Story by David Christian. Great story about the long waves of development over the entire course of history. Focusing just on the human development part of the story, human…
The Legacy of the Civil War by Robert Penn Warren. The book is almost 60 years old and still super relevant. And demands careful reading, he doesn’t cater to the…
Sabrina by Nick Drnaso. Graphic novel, odd little story which wanders around and doesn’t really go anywhere. Reviews were excellent but I found it dull. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.…
CSNY’s “Ohio” (Wikipedia, Youtube ) hits me hard every time I hear it. I still see the bodies on the news, the classmates in anguish. “How many more” resonates through…
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. This settled down into basic space opera but some fun language and ideas about an era in which we have dramatically more control over…
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty. Awesome tale of 6 travelers on a space ship, trying to figure out who among them is trying to kill all of them. Agatha Christie…
Semiosis by Sue Burke. Very good first contact tale, the things we meet might be very very different than us. No One is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell…
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton. Deep dive into the British efforts to combat the Nazis with sabotage, resistance, even terrorism. Well done. The Storied Life of A.…