A Very Scalzi Christmas by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great collection of Scalzi short stories and flash fiction about Christmas. If you like his sense of humor, you’ll enjoy the book. Depending on your reading speed, probably a little over an hour to complete.

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Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It will be very interesting to compare this book to Seize the Stars when I get to it next year. Both involve the seeming impossibility of pushing for justice against a society and economy that is dependent upon injustice. Whereas this book is relatively realistic, Ms Fan’s book is YA and may turn out to be more hopeful than realistic.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was more of a fan of the abridged Bible, but that’s probably because I have more familiarity with the Bible than Shakespeare. Still, it’s interesting to see how old negging is.

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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 bought bread that’s just as good from Wegmans.” So, not show-stopping or anything. And, out of all my hobbies, I practice it the least often because of the time commitments. (Gotta be home to start the bread, proof the bread, bake the bread)

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 Star Wars novels. But I think it’s really more that the novel reads like it was written in the 1980s (which it was). It’s full of that “karate stuff is cool " feeling from the 80s that culminated in films like The Karate Kid. I tend to do alright with Golden Age SF because I like the philosophical aspect behind most of the characters’ dialogue. But the 1980s seems to just fall into an uncanny valley - it’s almost like the modern SF I read, but just full of enough older tropes to feel a bit clunky. This story also seemed to revolve a bit too much on the one character in the know always having a bunch of gambits going on at once and refusing to reveal anything to the main character. So sometimes the wins felt a bit cheap. I also think the idea of training super karate soldiers to fight aliens just doesn’t make sense in the context of an interspecies war.

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 me.

Devil Take Me - The main character is a kid in an abusive household. Things got a little too metaphorical and weird and I couldn’t really understand the source of the horror or what was going on.

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 Mistborn Era 2, you know that Sanderson has used it to bring the series more into the cosmic war between gods that appears to be the full Cosmere story. Previous entries were mostly confined to easter eggs and the mention of a rival god known as Trell. This book takes things up to 11 and, if you haven’t read other parts of the Cosmere before this, you will be partly lost and partly truly missing out on the consequences of what’s going on as part of the mystery Wax and friends are solving.

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 it was a fun journey through history with our usual cast of characters. By this point in the series you should know whether or not you enjoy this writing which is centered on philosophical debates, traders haggling, and Hellenic partying and sexual escapades. It’s more of the same which is exactly what I wanted.

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 money very accessible. It felt like I was listening to a podcast series with a bunch of episodes (each chapter) that were fascinating and illuminated a lot about the history of money. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand money and what’s been happening in the world economy over the last few decades.

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 recent CS grad could certainly understand the words and concepts, but would be lacking the perspective of working in the real world with real life-cycle requirements and customer requirements and time crunches.