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 of alcoholic women who are married to rich men. (Although some of them are also entrepreneurs in their own right as well as being married to rich men) They tend to often meet up at an exclusive hair salon and the proprietor of the salon is another protagonist. Each chapter is told from the POV of one of the women and is narrated by a different voice actor. This provides a bit of meta-fun as we get to hear how each voice actor narrates the others characters who are speaking in their chapters. I may have been imagining things, but I felt that they put different inflections into the other characters’ voices depending on their relationships to one another.

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 and the storyline with Vetinari, Nobby, Colon, and Discworld’s version of Leonardo DaVinci. Vimes’ story isn’t presented as a straightforward mystery anyway. It’s mostly about how war makes people dumb as they get swept up in nationalism. There’s a slight mystery tugging at Vimes’ mind, but it’s not really central to anything. It just shows (near the end) that he was clever for not buying the simple explanations to things.

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 ability to have a greater understanding of the world around her compared to the “normal” folks around her.

Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript: Scrape, Clean, Explore & Transform Your Data by Kyran Dale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization either as part of your job or for an undergrad, grad, or PhD project. While I would probably use FastAPI rather than Flask, I heard recently that the Javascript library the author uses, D3, is still one of the best in class libraries for this kind of work.

Flask Web Development: Developing Web Applications with Python by Miguel Grinberg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read the second edition of the book

I’ve read lots of books covering web frameworks or GUI programming (both involve UI design and a different workflow where you’re often waiting for user input), but this one is one of the best I’ve ever read. While it’s traditional for a book to culminate in a blog or social media app (and this one does it too) there’s something about the way Grinberg writes that makes it so much more approachable. Also, something only more modern books can do, he has a github repo with all the code with commits that match different sections of the book.

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).