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 in the style of a Golden Age SF novel. That is to say, the characters spend many pages debating the philosophical issues of the novel. So if you like those old novels (think Asimov or Arthur C Clark), you’ll probably like this one.

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In some ways, the information here is not too different from some of the lessons I’ve been taught in managerial training or reading books by people like Steven Covey or Tony Robbins. But the main difference here, and the the thing that made the points relevant to me is that the author uses some very compelling examples that show that this is nowhere near as easy to do as some of the other types of books make it seem. Most interesting was the story of the conflict resolution guy (who invented arbitration divorce) who couldn’t see that he was locked in high conflict. And even once he did, he had trouble extricating himself. That made it a lot more relatable. If THIS guy has trouble, of course I’m going to have trouble. I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I intend to try and remember the lessons in this book both at work and in my personal life.

Trafalgar and Boone in the Drowned Necropolis by Geonn Cannon

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book continues on from the last one, but the author does a good job of catching readers up. If you like a Victorian era archaeological adventure story, you can do much worse than this. It works well and the story is enjoyable.

Warning: not for small children, contains explicit sex.

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Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, that was certainly something.

Tamsyn Muir seems to have created, with this series, a true experiment in making a genre book more about the journey than the destination. This is the second book in which almost nothing happens for most of the book. In fact, this is moreso the case in this book. It is not hard to see how this was originally just meant to be a small chunk of what is now book 4, Alecto the Ninth. In reality, the action in this book could have been just a few chapters of Alecto. And yet, this didn’t lead to a lower rating from me, because, by dedicating a whole book to this story, Muir earns the emotional payoffs with the characters.

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My utter enjoyment of this book is inexplicable to me. The subtitle says that it’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but McKinley doesn’t change too much from the original tale. Mostly she makes Beauty’s sister’s not be caricatures of vanity.

Yet there’s something about the way that McKinley wrote the story that just had me entranced the whole time. I couldn’t get enough of it and tore through it in record time (allowing for the fact that I was just reading it in snatches throughout the week).

As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software.

In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.

Calamity by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a perfect conclusion to the trilogy. Sanderson does a good job extending out everyone’s character growth and the natural progression of the story.

I don’t remember if, while reading the earlier books in the trilogy, I made the leap of Calamity as a metaphor for Satan. Satan is often referred to as Morning Star and Calamity has been shining up in space this whole time. This book makes the metaphor more explicit as Sanderson has Calamity explain that he has pushed the epics to greater paranoia in the hopes that it would exacerbate their cruelty.

On 15 October this year I competed at my first swim meet since high school, some 20ish years ago. Although I’d had various folks encourage me to join US Masters Swimming for almost as long, I’d always found a reason to put it off. Sometime in August or September I decided I wanted to do some swim meets. I think it was around the time that I was coming to terms with the fact that my foot injury was going to keep me from competing in my first marathon this year. I looked around to join a Masters team in order to get better at swimming and they required a membership to US Masters Swimming, so I signed up. After another week or so, I realized they didn’t have a schedule that would work for me, but now that I was registered with USMS, I could compete in swim meets. Luckily for me, the first meet of the 29th Carol Chidester Memorial Swim Series was coming up. I signed up and started looking forward to it.

Nightmare Magazine, issue 120 by John Joseph Adams

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Once again I bought an issue of Nightmare Magazine to share the stories with my wife. The descriptions on the site seemed interesting and, indeed, they were. The description that got me to buy it was for the short story Concerning the Upstairs Bathroom. That one turned out to be my favorite. Overall, a good issue and you can’t go wrong for only $3.

Let’s Talk About Hard Things by Anna Sale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well-written and well-narrated book that’s just on this side of a self-help book. There is some advice, but it’s really mostly a series of vignettes that illustrate some points the author wants to make as well as showing that there are sometimes counter-examples. It made me think about a lot of assumptions I’ve been carrying around regarding the various topic areas. I’d recommend it to just about anyone.