Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza by Ken Forkish My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m not an incredible baker, I’m an average baker. When I bake breads – my family is often happy with the taste, but my wife always says – “All that work and we could have…

The Blackcollar by Timothy Zahn My rating: 2 of 5 stars I’ll start off with a reminder that I use the tooltips for Goodreads ratings and 2 stars is “it was ok”. It may possibly have hurt that this was my first Zahn novel and I’ve heard so much about him because of the Thrawn…

Nightmare magazine 122: November 2022 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 1 of 5 stars I really was not feeling it with this issue. The editor mentions that these are all stories in Weird Horror. I’m not a big fan of Weird Science Fiction either, so I’m not surprised these stories all bounced off of…

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well, Sanderson has completed Era 2 of the Mistborn series. Originally intended to just be a bridge novella, Sanderson expanded it to 4 books. (Not surprising since he wrote 4 books during COVID out of boredom) If you’ve been reading the books from…

The Sacred Land by H.N. Turteltaub My rating: 4 of 5 stars Once again we join Menedemos and Sostratos as they sail around the Med. This time they head to Phoenicia and Israel. I was very curious what a pre-Hellenized Isreal would be like and what our Sostratos would think about the Isrealites. As usual…

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein My rating: 5 of 5 stars I know a lot about money and its history and I still learned a bunch in this book. Jacob Goldstein, who also narrates, uses his podcast-acquired skills to make the stories he uses to illustrate the history of…

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts by Kevlin Henney My rating: 4 of 5 stars I think this book is best read by someone who’s been in the software field for a few years – it provides the perspective to truly understand what the Experts are communicating. I think a…

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin My rating: 5 of 5 stars Rebecca Giblin and Corey Doctorow have written an incredibly important book for everyone to read, whether you’re a producer or consumer of cultural products (books, movies, music, etc).…

The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was a very interesting collection of short stories. They are companion piece to the dystopia described in Janelle Monáe’s concept album Dirty Computer. That said, these stories are mostly full of hope. They also depict a…

One of Us Is Dead by Jeneva Rose My rating: 3 of 5 stars The wife wanted something we could listen to while doing a bunch of driving last weekend. I don’t remember how we found this particular book, but she said it sounded fun. And she was right! The book centers around a bunch…

Jingo by Terry Pratchett My rating: 2 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. Rating dropped from 4/5 to 2/5 stars For a City Watch novel, this one is a bit of a weak procedural. Pratchett somewhat goes back to meandering storytelling as we go back and forth between Vimes’ storyline…

Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book definitely sticks to its title. Our protagonist is suffering from a few mental ailments and they play into the story in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it leaves us with an unreliable narrator. Other times it appears to give the narrator…

The Cage of Zeus by Sayuri Ueda My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is 1 of 2 books I was reading at the same time heavily using Science Fiction as a metaphor for modern issues. (The other is The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer) The Cage of Zeus is written…