InvestiGators: Off the Hook by John Patrick Green My rating: 4 of 5 stars Another fun entry in the Investigators to read with the kids. The cast of characters continues to grow and reward re-reads of previous books with lots of references to previous events. It’s evident now that Green has written each book to…

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale My rating: 4 of 5 stars My preschool kids have been enjoying Shannon and Dean Hale’s The Princess in Black series (I reviewed a few entries last year). So when I found out that Shannon Hale also does middle grade and young adult books, I recommended them to my oldest,…

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler My rating: 4 of 5 stars Welcome back to the crapsack/grimdark world of America in the 2020s as created by Octavia Butler in the 1990s. It is sometimes eerily prophetic. More about that later. The addition of Lauren’s daughter’s (Larkin) annotations to her mother’s journals provides a…

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. I have dropped the rating from 5 to 3 stars This book is all but divorced from all the other Discworld books. There’s at least one other one like this one – Small Gods. In that sense,…

Cook’s Illustrated 2019 by Dan Souza My rating: 4 of 5 stars As usual, a great collection of the year’s issues. I’ve already made a couple recipes from this book and America’s Test Kitchen continues to excel. View all my reviews

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’ve had this book for about four years, ever since I got it in a Humble Bundle. I knew that I wanted to read Octavia Butler some day, but I hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Then NPR’s Throughline decided to…

Third Daughter by Susan Kaye Quinn My rating: 4 of 5 stars I got this book as part of the Storybundle.com Extraordinary Steampunk Bundle. I had no idea what to expect when I started reading it. Based on the cover, I figured it was basically a Steampunk novel taking place in India rather than England.…

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. The rating went up from 3 to 4 stars This book revisits Granny Weatherwax, but while it keeps a lot of her personality traits, it seems to at least half-retcon the events of Equal Rites. The…

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book was quite a slow burn. (And I know some of the later books in this series are strongly disliked for keeping the story running in place) About a quarter of the way through the book I was certain this would be…

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well, that was quite an excellent book! My 9-year-old read it and then wanted to share it with me, so she asked me to read it to her before bed. I must say, this book was a lot more sophisticated…

The Official Scratchjr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code by Marina Umaschi Bers My rating: 4 of 5 stars Many of you may be familiar with Scratch if you’ve got kids about 15 or so years old or younger. It’s the hot language for the elementary and (in some places) middle school set to…

Sourcery by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book I believe this book marks the inflection point from the retconned books to the more continuity focused books. It appears that Equal Rites has already been retconned away by this book or else Rincewind is ignorant of…

Mort by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is my second time reading Mort I dropped the rating from 5/5 to 4/5 because I’m using the tooltips for the ratings. I really enjoyed this book a lot. In my re-read this is the first tone I have enjoyed without any reservations. But…

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book This is DEFINITELY a book of its times. I remember in the late 80s and early 90s there was a lot of fiction around whether women could really equal men in the workplace. Why then? I…

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book This second time around I dropped the rating from 4 stars to 3 stars. The book is definitely an improvement over The Color of Magic. I think, perhaps, Pratchett was starting to consider that Discworld…