I'm writing from Reese, Michigan, USA, in the cosy comfort of my in-laws lounge room.
Fiction
- The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde
- Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone
- Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
- The Road, Cormac McCarthy
- Foxglove Summer, Ben Aaronovitch
- The Peripheral, William Gimbson
- C, Tom McCarthy
- The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Dianna Wynne Jones
- The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie
- Before They Are Hanged, Joe Abercrombie
- Last Argument of Kings, Joe Abercrombie
Three Parts Dead can be safely skipped. Nothing to say about Joe Abercrombie that I haven't said before. Almost threw up reading The Complete Fairy Tales.
Foxglove Summer, the new P. C. Grant novel, is everything I hoped it would be. Ancillary Sword is a fitting follow-on from Ancillary Justice, and has confirmed my high estimation of Ann Leckie.
I wanted to like C, but couldn't. It was joyless and humorless, and the protagonist was entirely without character. Such theme. So literature. Very art. Amaze. Wow.
The Road was really good, and seems to me to be a pretty realistic depiction of an atheist worldview.
The Peripheral is sci-fi that's pretty squarely aimed at reflecting our own age back at us.
Non-fiction
- Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Tauber
- The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
- The 4-Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferriss
- Distributed systems for fun and profit, Mikito Takada
- Rubicon, Tom Holland
Good Calories is ultimately a book about why fat probably isn't as bad as you think. It goes into a reasonable amount of depth about the science: liver, hormones, carbohydrates, insulin and so forth. But more interestingly for me, it explores how the science got written. The nub is that getting accurate information about nutrition is astonishingly hard, but someone has to be able to answer the question "what should we eat?". Would recommend.
Power of Habit could be quite a lot shorter. Duhigg tells a great story, but some of the chapters could have easily been dropped.
All the while I read The 4-Hour Work Week, I couldn't help feeling that I would dislike Tim Ferriss if ever we met. He makes a couple of good points which resonated with me, an equally privileged white male.
Rubicon is Holland's best book. It's about Julius Caesar.
I read Distributed systems for fun and profit on my Kindle, because it is my weapon against distraction. It's very informative, and explains things very clearly. I wish I'd read it on my laptop, so I could follow the links.
Comics
Having a Marvel Unlimited means I haven't kept track of this. House of M, Black Panther, the J. Michael Straczynski run of Thor, Avengers Academy.