Getting Started with Adafruit FLORA: Making Wearables with an Arduino-Compatible Electronics Platform by Becky Stern

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First of all, lots of kudos for the authors including lots of photos. Many of the other microcontroller books I’ve read from MAKE have had illustrations, but this one actually has photos and that’s very helpful when illustrating sewing.

After reading this I’m inspired to mess around with some wearable tech, but also extremely terrified of screwing something up as someone who’s done little to no sewing. However, I might end up teaming up with my mother-in-law who’s a great seamstress to work on some projects. Just need to decide on a plan of attack first.

Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Massimo and his co-writer do an excellent job creating an introduction to the Arduino board. I started mucking around with the boards before reading this book because I’d done some projects with Atmel chips in undergrad (a couple decades ago) and I do software programming on the side. But I wish I’d read this book first as it would have saved me time on figuring stuff out on my own that’s unique to Arduino as well as stuff that I’d forgotten in the intervening decades. Programming hardware chips is very different from general purpose programming for a computer or cell phone. Not only are resources on the chip a lot more limited (although, in the case of the Raspberry Pi - getting closer and closer to a regular desktop), but input and output is also more limited. These microcontroller boards are meant for automation projects where you set something up (like a system to water your plants based on whether or not it is going to rain) or limited interactions. They’re running in a never-ending loop and that requires a different mindset.

Korean Home Cooking: Classic and Modern Recipes by Sohui Kim

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Beautiful photos and well-written recipes fill this book. I’ve added lots of them to my to-cook list. My only disappointment is that the BBQ section is more about grilling indoors than true BBQ.

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Love, Fishie by Maddy Gaiman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since Maddy Gaiman wrote this when she was 8 and I have a nearly-8 year old who loves to read and write, I figured it’d be a fun book to read together. She enjoyed it even though poetry isn’t her thing. I thought it was pretty neat that Maddy and Neil Gaiman write poems to each other. Overall, it’s a pretty neat collection.

Double Life by S. Usher Evans

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I met Ms. Usher Evans at Baltimore Comic-Con a year or two ago and she is a very prolific author. If any particular book of yours isn’t your cup of tea, you can try another - she has magical school YA, fantasy, and SF as well as others. This book is one of her science fiction books.

Geekomancy by Michael R. Underwood

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

To me, this book is Buffy meets Ready Player One done well. As I discussed in my RPO review, it was just way too overhyped for me vs what it delivered. This one, on the other hand, seemed to come from a more genuine place and fit in better into the story. Also, I love Buffy while dystopias (which I’ve been reading since middle school are starting to really bum me out). Anyway, this isn’t an RPO trash session, let’s get to this book.

The Circlet Treasury of Erotic Steampunk by J. Blackmore

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I’ve said many times before - I’ve been exploring more genres recently instead of locking myself into just one. I don’t remember how this ended up in my To-Read list back in 2014, but it’s definitely different than my usual fare. That said, my preferences for stories in this collection mirrored my preferences in the video world. I’m not a consumer of erotica movies, shows, etc. I don’t find sex entertaining for its own sake. But I do think that sex can be very contributory to a plot. Sometimes it can be a move forward for a character (see the many permutations of that in 1999’s Cruel Intentions) and other times it can just make the plot more true to life (see various movies either about dating - the opening to Train Wreck or the quarter-point of Forgetting Sarah Marshall - or married life) So in this collection I preferred the stories that were good Steampunk stories that happened to have good sex vs the ones that were just the literary equivalent of porn. The highest compliment I could give to any of the stories in this collection was some variation on - “I want to see more in this story’s universe!”

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 126 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Two Ways of Living” - A world in which humans can essentially hibernate by eating a ton of calories and then a chemical cocktail to go unconcious. Additionally, the person does not age. The short story essentially serves as a meditation on what kind of person would do such a thing and what their reasons might be. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending.

Drive by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prequels can be a tough thing to get right. The reader/audience already knows where things are going. Can you have any real tension? Well, if you’re JSAC, you know a great way to do it - by having it involve none of the characters of the main series and setting it generations in the past. Considering the point of this story is to document how the Epstein drive comes to be, it’s surprisingly touching and personal. Or rather, not surprising at all because my favorite aspects of JSAC’s writing have been the way they can write both a very character-centric plot and keep attention to the details - whether scientific, political, or economic.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think the best way to describe this book is to reference the last chapter and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s catchphrase on his podcast - the Cosmic Perspective. Even though I already knew a bunch of the info in the book (at least at the basic level), when I really thought about it, it was so hard to wrap my mind around the infinitely large and small quantities referenced by NDT.